iPhone/iPod touch
Hey everyone! I've been doing some searching through the forum and other sites but I can't seem to find some general specs of what the ipod touch and iphone can handle for 2d and 3d graphics. I have an idea that it probably can handle somewhere in between the ds and the psp, but I'd like some confirmation. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
Thanks!
Replies
Hope that helps!
The graphics chip is a PowerVR MBX lite. That is feature wise close to something like a GeForce2, think quake3 tech. From the architecture the chip is same as Dreamcast console. So have a look at dreamcast games to get an idea. Although the total performance will be a bit weaker than Dreamcast from what I have read. (there is a good post on performance in beyond3d forum).
Be aware that if you look at tech demos by PowerVR, their is different versions of their chips, and the iphone one is a bit slower / less capable than their top ones.
As tiled-rendering architecture is superior when it comes to overdraw, the tris count isnt totally comparable to the regular drawing as seen in other console chips. But from benchmarks I saw you can manage around 1 mio tris per second ~ 40 000 per frame @ 25 fps. Of course "all depends", these numbers come from a simple benchmarks, without much game ongoing. The chip supports bone animation and has enhanced multi-texturing (2 textures per pass), but there is no vertex/pixel shader support, 3G iphone may have full shader support.
PowerVR has its own texture compression tools that are half of DXT (ie 2 bits per pixel). Be aware that textures typically have 16 bit on mobile platforms, not 32bit per pixel in "uncompressed", as the screen doesnt show so much colors.
From what I read the PowerVR while not as high as in raw performance as PSP, has superior image quality (better anti-alias/ texture filtering). The iphone for sure is much beefier than a DS hardware wise.
The more complex looking graphical games I found so far are
[ame]
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