Cool VL Viewer forum

I am logged in, standing in my bedroom at home, on a Raspberry Pi 5!

I had to try this when I saw the arm64 version at the CoolVL download site, and I am gobsmacked. Henri, you are an absolute diety.

The performance isn't great, of course, single-digit frame rates even on low graphics in a sandbox. Has anyone tried this in a Pi 5 with a GPU card? Even dirt cheap mid-grade GPUs are much more performant than the built-in GPU on the Pi 5.

Sadly, the ARM64 platforms suffer from very weak GPUs...

On my Orange Pi 5 Plus, on a 1920x1200 screen, viewer window maximized, forward rendering mode, all graphics settings at max excepted 256m draw distance and "Terrain & trees" only for water reflections, I get 16fps in my skybox with the CPU loaded at only 20%, while on the ground, in front of my shop, looking at my little "forest" (lot's of alphas with the trees), I'm at 8fps and the CPU is not even loaded at 30%...

The bottleneck is entirely at the GPU level, and sadly the OpenGL drivers for it are totally bogus (forget about ALM or PBR).

As for using a desktop PC graphics card with a PI, it's a total non-sense; you'd need a separate ATX power supply, and an adapter board to connect the card slot to the PI's 4 lanes (instead of 16 for a PC) PCI-E 3 connector... Not to mention all the troubles getting your Linux ARM64 distro to work properly in such a configuration.
At this rate, you'd be better off using a mini-ITX RK3588 board (Youyeetoo is making a few, but they are not cheap: around 600 bucks), which got a PCI-E 3 4 lanes slot and can be powered by a normal ATX power supply.

However, ARM64 PCs are not far off, and I'd bet there will be more and more decent ARM64 notebook PCs in a close future, with stronger graphics solutions.

Today, I tried my "MainThreadCPUAffinity" debug setting trick on my Orange PI 5 Plus; I did not try it before, because Linux seemed "smart enough" to affect the heavy loads to the "big cores" on the RK3588.

However, once this debug setting set to 16 (2^4 = 4th core = 1st "BIG" core of the RK3588), I managed to squeeze out a whooping 20fps (instead of 16) in my sky box, and 11fps (instead of 8) in front of my shop at ground level, with a 50% affected CPU core usage (instead of 30%)... Still largely GPU-bound, obviously, but nonetheless a nice improvement...

Definitely worth a try if you got a BIG.little ARM64 SOC.