[Tilt, TyTN II, MDA Vario III General] herg62123:
THREE OF THREE PAGE

Direct3D

There are several things that can clue you in on these drivers not being hardware accelerated.

First, on some devices Mobile Direct3D doesn't work at all (they are missing), which also means they are not hardware accelerated.

Second, the system noted in the Display driver background section above is absent.

Another good one is looking at the registry entries for the D3DM drivers, which can be found at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\D3DM\Drivers. Here you will find two values, LocalHook and RemoteHook. On most devices, the LocalHook is set to htc_d3dm.dll and RemoteHook is left empty. LocalHook is used for drivers that load in the so-called user-space, and is generally only used for software rendering. This is because drivers loaded into user-space do not have direct hardware access. According to Microsoft, any driver set up this way may be assumed to be a software-only renderer. Note that it is not completely impossible for a hardware accelerated driver to be loaded this way, though it is certainly not advisable and we have never heard of such a case. RemoteHook is used for drivers that load in the kernel-space, and do have direct access to hardware, which is pretty much necessary for hardware acceleration. Also see this page on MSDN for more information.

Last but certainly not least, the D3DM driver found on the devices we have checked out, identified themselves as the "Microsoft D3DM Reference Driver". This is a software-only/skeleton D3DM driver provided by Microsoft to system builders, for debugging and development purposes. As far as we know, you aren't even allowed to spread this driver though, which makes this extra interesting.

OpenGL ES

There are two different interfaces available to make use of OpenGL ES, known as the Open GL ES Lite Profile and Common Profile. As the names suggest, one is the light version and the other is the normal version. These interfaces are provided by these two dynamic link libraries:

libgless_cl.dll - Lite Profile

libgless_cm.dll - Common Profile

On all devices we have tested, neither of these was available, meaning OpenGL ES is completely unsupported (and thus not hardware accelerated). Also see this page on Khronos for more information.

GAPI

We are not yet completely sure if this driver is hardware accelerated or not, however, as the complete driver system mentioned earlier is not present and none of the other drivers seem to have hardware acceleration, it would be fairly safe to assume that it isn't. The performance of this driver is also subpar, another good indicator that it's not using hardware accelerated functionality. A good indicator is tearing and flickering, this usually doesn't happen with a hardware accelerated driver (as seen with for example GAPI Benchmark 2.0). Looking at the driver itself, it does not seem to make use of any direct hardware calls.

Video playback

Video playback is dependant on several things. Slow display drivers will ofcourse limit the frame rate you get, and provide a far worse experience than fast display drivers. The decoding process also has something to do with it. The compression used in videos these days (almost always MPEG-4 or similar) is fairly complicated and does require a decent amount of processing power to decompress. The MSM7200/MSM7500 platform however also provides hardware acceleration for exactly this. Though a driver is present on these devices to assist in this (QTV), it does not seem to be used by any software. But even when this additional driver would not be present, movie playback should still be much faster than it currently is.

This has upset the owners of several of these type of devices. For this, a lot of people and I quote, "will never buy HTC products again cause this company doesn't support their devices". That means the TILT, on AT&T, sales will suffer cause HTC will not support current devices, but they want us to buy future devices with the update needed now for current devices. Why pay more money on future devices when HTC don't and will not support current devices now.

If there is anything, as in AT&T, can help push HTC to update the driver needed would be appreciated.

I have included some examples of issues posted on www.youtube.com that shows some examples:

The first video shows some 3d games with poor game play:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL8uq4FtduY

The second video shows extreme poor frames per second while taking pictures with the camera:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sjS9zz2bww

The last video shows explorer mode on 2 devices. On the left is the AT&T Tilt (Qualcomm 7200 400 Mhz Processor) and on the right is HTC Voyager made back in 2003 (Ti-Omap 132 Mhz Processor). As this video shows the lower processor out performs the bigger processor:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qbaDLzOU_Y