Gzdoom on a tablet

[Radlad75]

Has anyone had luck playing Gzdoom on any of the Microsoft tablets? Surface pro7 or x?

[Graf Zahl]

The CPU looks a bit slow which might hamper gaming, aside from that it looks fine - but I have no idea if the installed graphics driver is capable of handling OpenGL or Vulkan, considering it's a Microsoft product. You may have to install an official Intel driver if it doesn't work.

[Radlad75]

Thank You for the response! I’ll just stick to the surface 7 i7 then. 

[Radlad75]

I think it states the surface pro x can’t handle open gl over 1.1 

[Graf Zahl]

That means that the driver has no OpenGL. Normally you should be able to install an original uncrippled Intel driver to fix it, of course I do not have such a tablet and I do not know what Microsoft did.

 

[Redneckerz]

12 hours ago, Radlad75 said:

Has anyone had luck playing Gzdoom on any of the Microsoft tablets? Surface pro7 or x?

• The Pro 7 uses Intel Ice Lake processors and has Windows 10, which should run the latest GZDoom perfectly adequately.
• The Pro X is different: It runs Windows 10, but it is Windows 10 on ARM, courtesy of working with Qualcomm. They use a SQ1 processor, which is a Snapdragon 8CX with an upgraded GPU scoring 2.1 TF. On a technical level, it should run GZDoom. However, because it is an ARM processor, running on Windows 10, there is not broad support for this.

The reason for this is primarily because there is no GZDoom build that is and ARM and Windows 10, simply because that combination was previously limited to Windows 10 IOT.

 

2 hours ago, Radlad75 said:

I think it states the surface pro x can’t handle open gl over 1.1 

It can perfectly handle that, it has Vulkan support aswell. What isn't the case is proper driver support as Graf mentions. The Pro X and the SQ1 are the latest Snapdragon technologies, so its to be expected that extensive support is not yet available.

 

1 hour ago, Graf Zahl said:

That means that the driver has no OpenGL. Normally you should be able to install an original uncrippled Intel driver to fix it, of course I do not have such a tablet and I do not know what Microsoft did.

 

They made a customized version of a Snapdragon 8CX laptop-grade ARM processor and upgraded the GPU. It is pretty impressive power wise, the difference is here that Qualcomm/Microsoft do not have proper driver support on one end, and GZDoom not supporting this combination of hardware on the other. Which is to be expected since this is the latest kind of tech and on ARM.

 

Unless these machines take off (ARM on W10, Adreno GPU's) then it would make sense that GZDoom looks into support for it, but since GZDoom is an x86 PC based product, this is not likely.

[Graf Zahl]

GZDoom should be CPU agnostic - there is no assembly code, and all SSE2 stuff has a plain C++ equivalent. I wouldn't give any guarantees for Big Endian anymore, but that's not an issue here. Some people have managed to get it compiled on a Raspberry Pi. So, the main blocker would be the (few) dependencies. If we get OpenAL, Fluidsynth, libsndfile and libmpg123 compiled and assuming that the GPU will get a Vulkan or OpenGL driver, I see no reason not to support Windows/ARM.

 

Of course, first there needs to be a working graphics driver that supports Vulkan. I wouldn't hold my breath for OpenGL on such a new platform.

 

49 minutes ago, Redneckerz said:

Unless these machines take off (ARM on W10, Adreno GPU's) then it would make sense that GZDoom looks into support for it, but since GZDoom is an x86 PC based product, this is not likely.

 

Oh, I am absolutely certain they will, if the Windows that runs on them is a complete uncrippled version. That of course means that not supporting Vulkan is a killer issue, and currently it doesn't work.

 

Edited January 28, 2020 by Graf Zahl

[Redneckerz]

8 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

GZDoom should be CPU agnostic - there is no assembly code, and all SSE2 stuff has a plain C++ equivalent. I wouldn't give any guarantees for Big Endian anymore, but that's not an issue here. Some people have managed to get it compiled on a Raspberry Pi. So, the main blocker would be the (few) dependencies. If we get OpenAL, Fluidsynth, libsndfile and libmpg123 compiled and assuming that the GPU will get a Vulkan or OpenGL driver, I see no reason not to support Windows/ARM.

RaspZDoom and GZDoom-Android, yeah. There is definitely some development regarding the ZDoom/GZDoom codebase on ARM. (And ofcourse Delta Touch)

 

But a direct bleeding edge port of GZDoom is not a surefire way yet. Fortunately mobile hardware iterates rather fast over the years, to the point where in terms of gaming we are definitely in the ballpark for PS360+ performance. I say PS360+, because mobile GPU's more effect pushers than geometry pushers.

 

8 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

Oh, I am absolutely certain they will, if the Windows that runs on them is a complete uncrippled version. That of course means that not supporting Vulkan is a killer issue, and currently it doesn't work.

 

Im a bit on the fence here for now still. The first generation of these things (Snapdragon 850 based) were actually a bit underperforming (Hence why Qualcomm is now rolling out the CX-grade SoC's). It works, but its not high end, let alone competitive with Intel or AMD in that regard.

 

The newer generation has more promise, especially the 8CX and SQ1. Performance on the GPU front quite matches what Intel and AMD have to offer and CPU wise they are rolling near. Definitely a lot more suitable, so its on the consumer crowd to tell if it gets widespread adoption (Perhaps an 8CX mini PC would work aswell for this stuff).

 

Useless trivia: Adreno, Qualcomm's GPU, is an anagram of Radeon.

[Graf Zahl]

These things need time. We are now in the same situation as with x64 when it was new - lack of software. But let's not forget that from the basic architecture there's not much of a difference between x64 and ARM64 - both are little endian systems, the memory addressing modes are compatible and both use the same alignment rules. GZDoom does not have much code that depends on alignment so the CPU part should mostly just work. For most software it will just mean recompilation for ARM CPUs and they should be done.

 

Where I expect problems is software that depends on hardware quirks or low level "performance" hacks that are CPU specific. Unfortunately there's still a lot of this to be found in older game source bases.

 

[ReaperAA]

12 minutes ago, Redneckerz said:

Useless trivia: Adreno, Qualcomm's GPU, is an anagram of Radeon.

 

A useless but still awesome trivia :D

[Radlad75]

Wow! I’m so programming  illiterate but I think I made sense of everything there.

 

Would Lzdoom work on an Arm64 tablet(assuming I can transfer my purchase from my Steam library) ? 

Are there any other versions of Doom  that look as good as Gzdoom that aren’t open gl?

[chungy]

10 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

I see no reason not to support Windows/ARM.

As far as I'm aware, Windows/ARM is limited to running stuff from the Store only, rather than any random EXEs. That might be a reason depending on whether this still holds true and difficulties of getting it into the store.

[Graf Zahl]

From what I've read this new Windows for ARM is a fully featured version (minus proper graphics drivers from the looks of it.)

 

7 hours ago, Radlad75 said:

Would Lzdoom work on an Arm64 tablet(assuming I can transfer my purchase from my Steam library) ? 

 

No. LZDoom also uses OpenGL and that isn't supported. I think Vulkan support is far more likely on this platform than OpenGL, actually, but as long as Microsoft is in charge of the drivers neither will happen. I think the best hope would be a working Vulkan->DX12 wrapper, comparable to MoltenVK on macOS.

 

 

7 hours ago, Radlad75 said:

 

Are there any other versions of Doom  that look as good as Gzdoom that aren’t open gl?

 

It would require a Direct3D port, but none of these exist, because for cross-platform software a platform locked-in API is not desirable.

For the same reason such software does not support macOS's Metal natively but uses MoltenVK to be able to target the platform through Vulkan.

 

 

Edited January 29, 2020 by Graf Zahl

[Redneckerz]

9 hours ago, Radlad75 said:

Wow! I’m so programming  illiterate but I think I made sense of everything there.

 

Would Lzdoom work on an Arm64 tablet(assuming I can transfer my purchase from my Steam library) ? 

No. Assuming that tablet runs Windows, it is thus reliant on Windows ARM support for Doom ports. Which is close to non-existent.

If it is Android, the options are slightly more broad - LZDoom has no Android version. There is Delta Touch and an old GZDoom version for Android which likely does not work on the latest Android anyway.

 

Quote

Are there any other versions of Doom  that look as good as Gzdoom that aren’t open gl?

OpenGL is basically the domain of hardware accelerated Doom. In OpenGL, you have a few ports that have advanced features, but none match GZDoom's feature set.

 

In terms of Direct3D, this is actually hardly worth mentioning. Doomsday used to run a Direct3D renderer (Not sure if they still do) and there is the old as heck Doom3D port.

 

Useless trivia (As @ReaperAA likes these:) Doom3D was the basis for Doom 64 EX, which in turn became the Kex Engine.

 

8 hours ago, chungy said:

As far as I'm aware, Windows/ARM is limited to running stuff from the Store only, rather than any random EXEs. That might be a reason depending on whether this still holds true and difficulties of getting it into the store.

x86-64 emulation on Windows ARM is reported to be introduced soon, however existing translation layers (on previous generation Snapdragon 845) show a severe performance degradation. GZDoom would have no horse in that race there. Its partially why the new CX chips are significantly more powerful.

 

To confuse things, Microsoft also had the short-lived Windows RT, which was basically the forerunner to Windows 10 on ARM and ran on the first Surface tablet.