Vega Testing continues.

I’ve moved on to doing more detailed testing now on the Vega and am starting to reach the limitations. Its not all bad news though. Read on!

The first no-go area was Google Earth. This 3D application is just too slow to use on the Vega. The AMD Geode processor has no Direct3D/DirectX support so it drops into a software emulation mode which is just useless.

iTunes didn’t work either. I tried the new version 7 but it hung and on a second attempt I got to look through some pages but then it crashed. iTunes is a heavyweight application and it appears to use some 3D graphics so I guess it’s not surprising.

Running Skype (which will be using CPU-based arithmetic for all the codec work) was really borderline. The CPU was up at 80-90% and I experienced some dropouts. That’s disappointing because my old 400Mhz Ipaq with the RISC processor can handle that with no problem. There could be some optimisations that make it work but this is something I expected to work without any problems.

I tried an older (5 years old) version of Need for speed which worked. In fact, it was quite fun. Switching the mouse ‘disk’ into cursor key mode allowed me to use the Vega controls. It’s a shame that there’s no real 3D support. The form factor of the device lends itself well to gaming.

Moving on to some synthetic tests it’s clear that the processor is, well, basic. Sisoft Sandra reported very very low performance figures for the arithmetic tests, especially floating point compared to other x86 architectures. This is due to the lack of SSE support I guess. Disk performance was OK though (20MBps read / 16MBps write is easily good enough.) and the Cache and Memory tests were as expected with results in the same are as 500Mhz Pentium processors and PC100 RAM.

2D video performance is good. Nearly as good as my 1Ghz VIA C3 processor. I’ve run 1.8mbps DivX videos with an AC3 (Dolby) soundtrack decoded by AC3filter and it was perfectly smooth. With a 2.2Mbps DivX video there were some frame drops so 2Mbps looks like the limit for an advanced video code. Mpeg-2 should go higher but probably not to DVB-T speeds. As a video playback, there should be no real issues.

Funnily enough, memory hasn’t been a real problem. I’ve been running explorer, outlook express, livewriter and Skype with no issues. of course this is a fresh install of XP so that helps a lot. It will need to be kept clean and free of background apps to ensure that virtual memory from the hard disk doesn’t get used.

Screen rotation doesn’t really work properly. After rotating the screen through the desktop controls, the touch calibration was way off. I couldn’t get it to work in it’s native resolution either. There may be some tricks needed here.

The lack of Bluetooth and Wifi is causing me a problem. For Internet access via my cellphone and WiFi its just not practical to be having to remember to take and insert a USB stick in every time. Wifi performance using the USB stick was below what I get with a DLink CF card but as it’s a USB add-on, it can easily be changed.

Build quality seems nice even though that this is a non-production model. With the heavy battery (480g) I don’t like to be carrying it in one hand without a case but it certainly looks good.

One negative point about the otherwise great screen. At low backlight levels there is a noticeable pulsing when certain things happen on the device (disk access for example.) Its not bad, just annoying when you see it.

I’ve tried remote desktop over my WiFi LAN and it works flawlessly as far as I can see. Using this method its possible to run more heavyweight applications on the Vega screen. For example, photo-editing software and some 3D applications will run faster using this method.

This section is being written on the Vega using an rdp session to my main pc with the on-sceeen keyboard using my fingers. its not to bsdactualy. its much quicker than a numeri keyoad and T9 for example bot nosubstitute for a real keyboard. rdp works very well.

I will be running a few more real-world tests over the next 24 hours and then starting to write up a detailed report. I like this device. It makes a perfect companion PC for audio, video and low-end tasks like blogging (livewriter works OK) browsing, email and PIM applications. It’s not so good for note-taking or any extended text input. It also definitely not a 3D powerhouse. Don’t expect any 3D games to work on this device.

Vega data sheet with images and links.

Vega gallery

Regards

Steve / Chippy.