[Tilt, TyTN II, MDA Vario III General] jgmdean:
Two extremes

Just because I wanted to prove a point for those not necessarily familiar with the rigors of benchmarking methodology. I ran two tests.

I am running a Tilt with Dutty's v4 RTM, and 15.32 radio (at least today I am :D), my own splash screen and with major today tweaks and more software loaded than I care to think about.

For the first test I left a flash animation with sound running in flash light, Mail open, PIE open, sound through my BT headphones, System activesync'ed to my laptop via BT, *AND* played with the stylus on the screen now and again. Oh, and I installed the Benchmark to my microSD card, which is a 4GB microSDHC Class6.

The result? (Drumroll Please!) A whopping 0800 Final Score.

For the second Run I closed all the aplication, switched to "airplane mode", and muted the device. The result:

Test1 1209

Test2 2280

Test3 2613

Test4 1477

Test5 0592

Finale Score: 1634

The *POINT* people is that whatever else your system is doing has a *HUGE* effect on a benchmark, so the variation we've seen here is not unexpected. Given that Microsoft has a less than stellar history with scheduling it should come as no surprise that the landscape switch performance is all over the map. Hardware accelerated graphics would speed up the rendering of the graphics primitives, but the processes generating those primitives may still be blocked and sleeping more than their "fair share".

Now, as to the effect of the software drivers: Essentially screen rendering (2d or 3d) is competing with other processes for the main system CPU (Which is a RISC running at 400MHz, but then again, it's a small screen, and screen size MATTERS when rendering in software, in hardware - not so much, but I digress). Thus a game or video playback whose graphics needs can be satisfied by the CPU and are not interrupted too badly will appear to play well. Hardware accelerated graphics wouldn't make them perform any better, the main CPU would just have to do less work. less work should equal better battery life as I believe this chipset does clever things to reduce power consumption when it's less than 100% busy. Applications that want to "spend" main CPU time on other things than rendering: pathfinding and AI in games, and prefetching in video for example should show a marked improvement with hardware graphics acceleration. Additionally those reclaimed CPU cycles could check mail etc in the background so that a graphics intensive application stands a much better chance of not being interrupted and "stuttering".

Graphics hardware acceleration is not a cure-all either: If there is a flaw in the hardware design, or the drivers are written badly using the hardware acceleration can perform *WORSE* than software rendering. If you're old enough to remember some of the first 3dFX products on the PC, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Now I'm not saying this is the case, but if it were, one could hardly expect HTC to publicly berate Qualcomm (large company, supplier of theirs, and has many lawyers) about it. The spin control would look a lot like what we've seen, and there would be many "interesting" meetings that we wouldn't know about. While I don't believe that annoying your enthusiast and developer user base is the best way of enhancing shareholder value in the medium or long term, that's my opinion and wasn't my call as I don't work at either company in any kind of capacity. http://www.htcclassaction.org was an entirely predictable result, hopefully someone's head will roll... :rolleyes:

It's also entirely possible that the software renderer in WM6.1 has been improved, would someone check the versions please?

I'd also be really interested in the result of this benchmark on an LG KS20. It has the same Qualcomm MSM7200, and supposedly some hardware accelerated drivers, that seem to be incompatible with the Kaiser.

For me personally, the main advantage would be battery life as that's the most critical thing for me in a battery powered device. (My Mugen 3000mAh battery shipped today, Yay! :) ) For all the above described, you can't really say that HTC (or AT&T for that matter) really pushed this device as a multimedia powerhouse. It's quite possible that, say to pick a random example, that the Broadcom suit mess caused Qualcomm to slip badly or miss an issue with either the MSM7200 hardware or driver development (my guess would be the latter) and thus at the time the Kaiser development was frozen there were no drivers available or that were acceptably bug-free and performant, or there was a flaw in the chip or HTC's implementation that affected the graphics acceleration. Given this scenario HTC would have probably elected to not slip the the device, ship it with software drivers, not market the multimedia capabilities heavily at launch or afterwards, and keep their fingers crossed that not too many users noticed or complained. I'm not ruling out that the RLoD problem isn't related to this somehow either.

HTC's decision is brutally simple: Will they make more money devoting resources to new devices, or upgrading/fixing old ones? I'd bet on the former given their statements. Such is the corporate jungle.

Anyhoo, keep benchmarking people, it's interesting to see the variations across ROMs, usage patterns, loaded software etc.

BTW the one *VERY* obvious issue with the software drivers is the touch screen. Touch the screen while the benchmark is running and watch it stutter and the score drop. This is because the CPU is having to handle a hardware interrupt with software code rather than letting hardware deal with it and DMA'ing the results. "Doodling" or single touch has no perceptible difference which suggests that the interrupt code is pretty efficient and the "cost" is mostly in context switching to grab the IRQ.

So am I happy? Eh, *MOSTLY*.

I like the kaiser hardware, I like AT&T's high speed network (when and where it's available), and i bought it primarily as a personal productivity tool with some light multimedia duty.

I do not like the AT&T bloatware, the bugs, and the fact that I can't run some games or play some videos smoothly or that the touch screen causes stuttering. I'm annoyed, but not surprised that I had to flash a hacked ROM to get the device to what I consider usefullness.

I'm extremely grateful to all the talent here at xda that have contributed so generously to making my life better through what is the most personal device I use daily, bar my wristwatch possibly.

Stock AT&T Tilt I'd give a D-. Tilt with effort and a ROM from here and some additional software I'd give a B+. If the chefs can ever get their paws on some working hardware accelerated graphics drivers, even if it's only the touch screen handler, it would push it into "A" territory for me.

Oh, and a $150 "refurb" is a steal. Tell your friends to go get one and then come here! :D

James