Can I use H5 sbc Armbian play openGL games like 0.A.D

[wjhhxhww]

Hi, 

 

I'm a new user to SBC and is thinking of buy an orange pi pc 2. Since it has a Mali450 GPU and the manufacturer claims that this SBC support OpenGL, can I use that to play some open source games like 0.A.D on armbian? Is armbian have mali gpu drivers installed?

 

Thanks.

 

 

[Igor]

6 hours ago, wjhhxhww said:

Is armbian have mali gpu drivers installed?

Experimental open source drivers are included into kernel 4.19.y, but performance is not very good. Not sure if such game is playable. 

 

It might be possible to integrate binary drivers, which should run faster, but its plain speculation. Don't hold on this. Since we have no plans/resources to bring this up, you are more or less on your own to try the integration. Our primary focus is making a ground that this is possible, but sometimes you still need to invest some of your time to get advanced thing working.

But there are many other boards, where MALI supported gaming should be possible OOB. @NicoD can tell more about.

[NicoD]

I'm no expert in that. I think @JMCC knows more about what boards are good for OpenGL/gaming.
I do know a few people who port games to SBC's. And from what I know the Raspberry Pi is a much better choice for that.
It performs a lot better since all software has been optimised for it.
There are open source drivers for the Mali 450. Mostly for the VPU things have improved a lot, but I'm not aware of OpenGL to run great on it.

Certainly when you are new to SBC's it's better to learn these things on the Raspberry Pi since there's a lot more documentation, and a lot more people who can/will help.
I recently made a video about an image for the Raspberry pi full of PC games, ported by a friend Salvador.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meo9MzHVZcU

Maybe there's a big gaming community on Orange Pi's. They do sell a lot SBC's. I'm not a big fan of their boards, so I don't know the community that well.
 

15 hours ago, wjhhxhww said:

Since it has a Mali450 GPU and the manufacturer claims that this SBC support OpenGL

That's something they all claim. And for Android it can be the case. But for Linux that's a totally different thing. There is no support from Orange Pi themself for these things.

The RK3399's should be great for your purpose. Salvador is getting a RockPi4B. I can't wait to see what he'll do with that. Tho I think the NanoPi M4 is easier to use it for this. (better software/support)
The Odroid C2 also has great gaming support. But it's getting to be underpowered these days. The Odroid N2 isn't ready for this, I hope it will be in the future.
The Tinker Board should also have good OpenGL functionality. I haven't tested it.

There's many more factors for native Linux gaming than only the Mali driver. X11 drivers for windowed gaming for example.
Again, I'm no expert at all. I'm also no gamer. But I do like to see what's possible.

@Igor A gaming sub-section in the future on the Armbian forum could be cool. Where people can share their experiences, share .sh files for easy installation, and with tutorials on how to get things working.
I know you've got enough work. So there needs to be enough support by the community to run it seperate from the Armbian crew.
Maybe it could be enough to create a gaming link to a sub-forum, and just let people create everything as they like. I would be willing to monitor everything.
These days a lot more is possible with Armbian. And information about it is scattered all over the internet.

I don't know if many people use Armbian for gaming. I know some people asked about it. Maybe create a thread in general chit chat to see if there's interest in that.

[JMCC]

As in so many other cases, the board I'd recommend for this task is Odroid XU4, specially since it is selling for $50 right now. You already have fully working GPU drivers for a recent 4.14 kernel, and even a distro focused on gaming (see this video from @NicoD)

[NicoD]

14 minutes ago, JMCC said:

As in so many other cases, the board I'd recommend for this task is Odroid XU4, specially since it is selling for $50 right now. You already have fully working GPU drivers for a recent 4.14 kernel, and even a distro focused on gaming (see this video from 

Right, I forgot to mention that one With the RK3399's the most powerful one. 

[JMCC]

As a matter of fact, OpenGL 1.3 can be emulated through GL4ES from any GLES2 compliant board, but even if the current state of the Lima drivers were good enough for that to work , performance in a Mali 450 would be rubbish.