[Android Stick & Console AllWinner based Computers] poorchase:
Video output question and Uberoid vs Stock Performance Observations

Hello all,

So I am one of the happy new owners of the CVD602’s (same as 601, but is bundled with both keyboard and mouse) thanks to the Meh . c om sale. Well, actually I got two that I have been playing with. So I wanted to share some observations and throw a couple of questions out there.

The first iCraig I opened I hardly at all checked out the stock rom, and flashed Uberoid 3.1 right away, which has been working ok, with Google Play, Netflix, and MX player with H/W+ decoding worked quite well. Well, it was still only kind of ok, since it has been bit laggy and not exactly pretty on the eye as the UI and wallpapers looked dithered and as if color depth was lacking. So I started looking into video and performance.

About video, I looked and tinkered to discover that “sys/slass/graphics/fb” (I probably don’t have the path quite right from memory) or what I understand to be color depth setting is indeed set to 16, and there seems to be no way to change that. Oh well…

More curiously, as I tinkered I also tried a few different screen info/settings apps, which showed, as someone has mentioned earlier, that the device is set to 160 dpi. An interesting find though was that several apps reported a screen resolution of 1280 x 672, and stated that the device had a 9” screen. This was a consistent result regardless of the Settings>Display setting of 1080 or 720. I also have tried this stick on 2 tvs, an old Samsung 23” LCD and a newish 50” LG plasma. The results were the same. From this a question comes to my mind: is the device rendering video out at 1280 x 672 and just upscaling it to 720 or 1080 (whichever you set under Settings>Display)? If so, it would seem to be logical to keep it at 720 no matter if your TV/monitor is 1080 native. Thoughts?

Also, once I hooked up my second stick still running stock, I noticed that it seemed snappier that the first one running Uberoid. The stock rom is actually also Jellybean, but it is missing Google (and root). I did try Netflix, and surprisingly, it worked, albeit video quality was quite a bit worse than on the Uberoid one. To start comparing performance between these two roms, I ran Quadrant, which wasn’t terribly consistent across attempts, but it did seem to consistently show a discrepancy in performance in several categories:

Stock:

Total: 843

Cpu: 1587

Mem: 1028

I/O: 659

2D: 144

3D: 795

Uberoid:

Total: 753

Cpu: 359

Mem: 1175

I/O: 889

2D: 172

3D: 1166

So, while most measurements were in the same ballpark (well, no more than 30% of each other), the CPU benchmark was much higher on the device running the stock firmware. Why would that be? Quadrant system info reports exact same stats on both devices: 1200MHz, ~800MB ram…

Unfortunately, other than snappier launcher performance I cannot compare the performance of any other apps yet since I just hooked it up and haven’t rooted or got Google Play going. Heck, I couldn’t even get Antutu on the stock device since Amazon doesn’t have it.

So, to reiterate my questions:

1.	Is it plausible that the iCraig device renders video at a lower 1280 x 672 res and then upscales it? If not, what does it mean when screen resolution apps report this resolution? And if yes, it should make most sense to set the Settings>Display setting to 720 and call it a day, right?

2.	How could it be that the Uberoid rom would so severely handicap the CPU in these sticks? Could there be a solution to bring CPU performance up in this rom? (SetCPU and the like do not work by the way). If not, it seems it would be better to pursue rooting and installing Google services and Play market on the stock rom, right?

Thanks,

Poorchase