20 Feb, 2008
Chasing the 3D hardware acceleration on mobile devices
Posted by: Anca Alimanescu In: Mobile Dev| OpenGL ES
As seen until now after finished with the basics of building a 3D application on the Windows Mobile platform, I started to notice the advantages and disadvantages on using OpenGL Es on Windows Mobile. The available free implementations of OpenGL ES that I could find for Windows Mobile were only SW implementations and made no usage of the hardware acceleration of the graphic card. Doing some research I’ve found out that Nvidia might provides some implementations of OpenGL ES but this is only for their clients.
So, in order to start studying the posibility of using the 3D HW acceleration, I started looking deeper into what Nokia phone and especially the Nokia N95 smartphone offers.
As it uses Symbian OS, I decided to have a look on how to start programming on Symbian using OpenGL ES. After a small research I saw that using OpenGL Es on Symbian was extremly well documented and explained. Here is an overview of Nokia and OpenGL ES.
So, some few more start-up hints:
1. Some general things about Symbian.
2. Some tools and SDKs for Symbian can be found on the Symbian Developer Network site. As far as I have seen the SDKs are free but you have to register in order to use them.
For my Nokia N95 application I downloaded the S60 3rd Edition SDK. As IDE you can choose between:
– Carbide C++ : based on the Eclipse platform. Comes in three “flavors”: Express, Developer and Proffesional. Only the Express version is free.
– Carbide VS, this is a plug-in for Visual Studio that allows you to develop C++ Symbian projects in Visual Studio 2005 and 2003. The plugin is free to download and use.
– CodeWarrior IDE that i think also needs a paied licence.
For Carbide and Carbide VS you have the emulator included.
3. Information about 3D applications in Symbian devices.
4. An implementation of OpenGL ES on Symbian for the desired platform. You can download it from here. And here you can see a list of questions that might help you a little more. After installing the SDK, you will notice it has included very good documentation, training courses and demos on how to start implementing OpenGL ES applications.
