Is there a guide anywhere on getting hardware acceleration working properly on the Samsung Chromebook 2 or the Hardkernel ODroid XU3? These devices use the Mali T628. I have followed the guide at Graphics and Compute Development on Samsung Chromebook - Mali Developer Center Mali Developer Center , however the performance is lackluster. My suspicion is with the armsoc DDX driver. I believe that the guide was written with regards to the older Samsung Chromebook that used the Mali 400.
es2info shows that the system is not using mesa software rendering. I obtain about 200fps with es2gears, and when the window is enlarged, the framerate drops to about 30fps. The biggest problem is with 2D performance. I realize that the Mali devices are not 2D, but that the driver should be passing on the 2D operations to 3D via Glamor or the like. Moving windows such as a web browser around on the desktop results in very poor performance and user interface latency.
Is there a different xf86 driver that should be used with the T628?
Hi jwestervelt,
It is also worth remembering that the Mali GPU is a 3D GPU, and not a 2D HW blitter engine. 2D windowing operations should take advantage of the 2D HW block in a device, if the BSP supports this, however this is not controlled by ARM and so our public BSP does not have this support included. As Chris has already pointed out, an easy way to overcome this is to use a windowing system that uses OpenGL ES API instead to render all parts of the UI, 2D and 3D. Then this will utilise the GPU for all operations and you will get hardware accelerated performance.
I hope this helps,
Michael McGeagh