VIA APC8750 review
November 13, 2012 | 10:45
Companies: #arm #debian #raspberry-pi #via #wondermedia
Graphics performance is one area where thing get a little muddier. The Raspberry Pi's impressive Broadcom VideoCore IV graphics processor is nothing short of a marvel, playing to the chip's original design goal of a low-power processor for multimedia playback. The graphics portion of the WM8750, by contrast, is somewhat weaker.
In particular, there's an oddity in the specifications that, to be fair, VIA does make clear in its documentation: maximum output resolution. While WonderMedia claims the WM8750 is more than capable of outputting a 1920x1080 Full HD image, the APC8750 is capped at 1280x720. Compared to the Pi, which is quite happy driving displays of even higher resolution through HDMI-to-DVI adapters, that's a significant drawback and means you're left with oversized, blurry images on most displays.
Despite both VGA and HDMI outputs, the APC8750 can only manage 720P video.
Things get better when it comes to accelerated graphics. One of the biggest complaints we had of the Raspberry Pi was how difficult it was to get at the power of the VideoCore IV: although 3D acceleration was possible, there is still no 2D graphics driver for the desktop environment. The result is sluggish general-purpose performance, with webpage scrolling in particular causing the Pi to struggle.
Under Android, that's not a problem from which the APC8750 suffers. Booted into the default operating system, a process which takes about 30 seconds, the browser proved responsive and scrolled smoothly even on complex pages like our own home page. At least, when it wasn't crashing.
2D performance under Android is good - when it's not crashing.
Under Raspbian, it's a different story. As with the BCM2835 in the Pi, the WM8750 has no 2D acceleration for X in the operating system - meaning you're back to herky-jerky scrolling in more complex web pages. It's also not possible to easily alter the memory split between CPU and GPU in the APC8750. Where the Pi can be configured to give the GPU as little as 8MB or as much as 128MB, the APC8750 is stuck at the default 64MB - likely the reason behind its 720P video output limit.
With Broadcom having recently released a portion of its graphics code under an open-source licence, we'd bet that the Pi solves this problem before the APC - but, as it stands, we wouldn't recommend either for use as a web browsing station.
In particular, there's an oddity in the specifications that, to be fair, VIA does make clear in its documentation: maximum output resolution. While WonderMedia claims the WM8750 is more than capable of outputting a 1920x1080 Full HD image, the APC8750 is capped at 1280x720. Compared to the Pi, which is quite happy driving displays of even higher resolution through HDMI-to-DVI adapters, that's a significant drawback and means you're left with oversized, blurry images on most displays.
Despite both VGA and HDMI outputs, the APC8750 can only manage 720P video.
Things get better when it comes to accelerated graphics. One of the biggest complaints we had of the Raspberry Pi was how difficult it was to get at the power of the VideoCore IV: although 3D acceleration was possible, there is still no 2D graphics driver for the desktop environment. The result is sluggish general-purpose performance, with webpage scrolling in particular causing the Pi to struggle.
Under Android, that's not a problem from which the APC8750 suffers. Booted into the default operating system, a process which takes about 30 seconds, the browser proved responsive and scrolled smoothly even on complex pages like our own home page. At least, when it wasn't crashing.
2D performance under Android is good - when it's not crashing.
Under Raspbian, it's a different story. As with the BCM2835 in the Pi, the WM8750 has no 2D acceleration for X in the operating system - meaning you're back to herky-jerky scrolling in more complex web pages. It's also not possible to easily alter the memory split between CPU and GPU in the APC8750. Where the Pi can be configured to give the GPU as little as 8MB or as much as 128MB, the APC8750 is stuck at the default 64MB - likely the reason behind its 720P video output limit.
With Broadcom having recently released a portion of its graphics code under an open-source licence, we'd bet that the Pi solves this problem before the APC - but, as it stands, we wouldn't recommend either for use as a web browsing station.
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