RaspberryPi vs Dragonboard

A lot of people have asked how to get MonoGame running on Raspberry Pi.
The easiest way to do it is to run Win10iot.
Unfortunately, the performance is crap. win10iot doesn’t use the gpu on pi, so it runs totally in software. I read somewhere that this is because the gpu is optimized for opengl, but win10 runs on directx.

Fortunately, the next step up win10iot device DragonBoard is still relatively cheap ($75), and DOES support directx.

Here’s a MonoGame project running on Raspberry Pi 3, Win10iot, running at 848:480 resolution (the LOWEST 16:9 aspect ratio available):

It only gets about 15-20 fps :stuck_out_tongue:

Same exact project running on DragonBoard, Win10iot, 720p:

It’s running a solid 60 fps :slight_smile:

tl;dr:
Raspberry Pi 3 = old & busted
DragonBoard 410c = new hotness

Cheers!

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On raspbian os you could enable “opengl experimental driver” for full hardware acceleration.

Did you do anything special to make your game work on the pi? I set the resolution to 848:480, but my game only runs for about 10 seconds before the pi restarts. Did you do any code optimizations, or did it just work for you?

hahaha yeah, I bet I know what is going on.

There’s no way your code can cause the entire board to reset. My projects have thrown unhandled exception, which just crashes to the dashboard. But MonoGame projects use a lot of CPU power and RaspberryPi are notorious for overheating… which causes the entire board to reset.

The only “optimization” I did to get my game running on pi was install a $2 heatsink from Adafruit :wink:

Hope this helps. Cheers!

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