Treo 800w: Direct3D Hardware accelerated? Sure looks it.

One of the big, ongoing stories we've been following here relentlessly at WMExperts is the Qualcomm/HTC video driver issue--specifically it looks like a lot of the current generation devices make use of software as opposed to hardware accelerated Direct3D drivers. Exceptions to this are the new HTC Diamond and Touch Pro devices.

In our forums, Jeff Kirvin (long time tech geek and guru) has found an interesting gem on the Sprint Treo 800w: namely under \Windows is a file called "D3DDemo.exe" (which also has a Texas Instruments icon to match the TI chipset on board).

What happens when you click it? You get that cool little spinney cube thing going on along with the very important to know Frames Per Second (FPS). In Kirvin's pic it shows 35.45 FPS and we've hit 38.79 FPS on our device (tweaked out for speed). That's fast.

So besides the Palm tweaks you can rest assured that you have some serious graphic acceleration going on to keep things zippy. Perhaps that's why it trounces the Tilt in a Internet Explorer scrolling contest, eh?

Anyone up for some Doom or Quake III? Call me.