3d Capabilities

[borgqueenx]

What device has the best 3d capabilities? I mean, the psp has really nice 3d graphics if i compare it with my iphone games. why is that? And is the pandora better then all?(think so).
Thank you for your replys

 

[Alpha2]

Zottd had a very interesting post once talking about why some of his iphone programs were not running better and while my tech knowledge doesnt match many people here the understanding I took from it was that, discounting the transparent overlays he needed for controls on his emmulators the iphone used not only a weird way of displaying video bot also used a lot of bandwidth for other simultaneous functions not having anything to do with the games themselves, subsequently slowing them down drastically.

The PSP was never meant to have super high resolution graphics, and generally uses the normal LCD blurring to effect a ghetto style of antialiasing. It's always been said to be be slightly below the PS2 interms of graphics but more efficient and thus capable of a bit more in a proportional mesurement. clearly many games can be ported from the PS2 directly to the PSP with some loss of resolution, lighting and geometry but not as much as some would think, Some optimization and forethought on graphics can go a long way to creating some incredible graphics.

Pandora though beats both out interms of capability thanks to a higher resolution screen, and a more powerful processor. The problem is taking advantage of these things will be harder for develoeprs who are not of the same magnitude as a developer with a 50 man team and millions of dollars backing them. With that the Pandora could blow PSP's 3d abilities away (atleast in the sense of a comparison between the PS2 and old xbox graphics levels) but the problem is getting a team that can produce on that level for little or no money, the ability of a system is one thing the ability to make it perform at it's best is a totally different thing.

 

[sam fisher]

By processor I assume you mean CPU? The CPU Has very little do do with graphics performance. We are talking about the graphics hardware here.

 

[borgqueenx]

so how does the psp beats the iphone in 3d graphics?
becouse the iphone got pretty good 3d games, but i never seen a iphone game beat an psp game.

 

[Exophase]

so how does the psp beats the iphone in 3d graphics?
becouse the iphone got pretty good 3d games, but i never seen a iphone game beat an psp game.

More serious production efforts coming from big companies with a lot of money results in better looking games on PSP: if you ask me, the overall graphical quality of a game has a lot more to do with who is developing it than what the machine can push. If we are to believe John Carmack then iPhone has better 3D capabilities, although I doubt it's really that black and white. I don't think the OS/API/whatever overhead is as great for 3D as it is for soft rendered 2D graphics (that zodttd has to deal with) but I don't think it's nothing either (also according to Carmack)

 

[borgqueenx]

so how does the psp beats the iphone in 3d graphics?
becouse the iphone got pretty good 3d games, but i never seen a iphone game beat an psp game.

More serious production efforts coming from big companies with a lot of money results in better looking games on PSP: if you ask me, the overall graphical quality of a game has a lot more to do with who is developing it than what the machine can push. If we are to believe John Carmack then iPhone has better 3D capabilities, although I doubt it's really that black and white. I don't think the OS/API/whatever overhead is as great for 3D as it is for soft rendered 2D graphics (that zodttd has to deal with) but I don't think it's nothing either (also according to Carmack)

i understand that it also depends on the creators, how beautiful a game will look. But i see the iphone news site every day, and i ave about 50 nice looking iphone games on my iphone. but the psp beats them all easy...and i have about 30 games on my psp. all better then one single game on my iphone. if i compare the graphics.

 

[lulzfish]

That's because the PSP games have much more effort put into them, and they're probably way more expensive for it.

 

[borgqueenx]

That's because the PSP games have much more effort put into them, and they're probably way more expensive for it.

so you're saying there is not a single app store game for sale that beats psp quality games? that no one in the app store put effort in it like the psp dev's do?
its hard to believe that...

 

[lulzfish]

Apparently not.
Why is that hard to believe? The iPhone isn't really a great gaming platform [edit: I mean the controls are made of suck], I wouldn't expect it to attract the kind of big developers the PSP has.

Just because it's a good graphics platform doesn't mean it will ever necessarily have good games.

 

[borgqueenx]

Apparently not.
Why is that hard to believe? The iPhone isn't really a great gaming platform [edit: I mean the controls are made of suck], I wouldn't expect it to attract the kind of big developers the PSP has.

Just because it's a good graphics platform doesn't mean it will ever necessarily have good games.

it is hard to believe becouse some good dev's has made games for the iphone. like Electronic Arts(not that those guys are great devs)
how many money would a developer make if he creates a iphone game with the graphics like on a psp? it would be the first, and thats why he would make much money

 

[Exophase]

That's because the PSP games have much more effort put into them, and they're probably way more expensive for it.

so you're saying there is not a single app store game for sale that beats psp quality games? that no one in the app store put effort in it like the psp dev's do?
its hard to believe that...


How many games in the app store cost $40, when the top selling ones are only $2-$3? App store is a place where shovelware dominates, no one is going to spend over a million dollars to develop an app store game. Even a big company won't do that. With the very limited controls of the iPhone it's hard to do a really AAA title anyway.

 

[borgqueenx]

still its hard for me to believe. creating a aaa tilte would be hard, and only the best developers can do that, i agree. but there aint just 1 single game that is even close to the graphics the psp has. none! of all those million applications. that means not one of all those dev's tried to make an app with good graphics....or they are not good enough.
and why would a big company not spend a million for a app store game? I mean, if its possible that the iphone is better then the psp, i would really spend 50$ for a aaa title.

i just still dont get it...but i am not a developer so i dont understand everything well...i was a dev once but my team abandoned me..

 

[Exophase]

and why would a big company not spend a million for a app store game? I mean, if its possible that the iphone is better then the psp, i would really spend 50$ for a aaa title.

You do not represent the typical demographic spending of the iPhone. Games with above average (for app store) production quality selling for $10 or so tend to do pretty poorly. Sure, a game backed by a big company will get more exposure and sales, but people are still going to be hesitant to spend that kind of money on an iPhone game when they're used to really cheap ones. I think people are hesitant in general to spend the same kinds of money for a game they download that they would for a game they have a physical copy of. Plus, the iPhone's limited control scheme really does tailor it more towards more casual games that favor motion only control or light touchscreen control (as opposed to hammering it for hours like you might a PSP).

 

[Alex.]

Did you buy those 50 IPhone games, or pirate them? If you bought them, would you have bought even a tenth of them if they cost ten times their current price, of course with finer graphics and more content? What would entertain you more, 5 games with five-star graphics, or 50 games that look a little rudimentary?

I think the role of graphics should be to spark your imagination, not be an end-all visual depiction. It will be very boring when all games will look like 20 Megapixel snapshots of the real world.

 

[Alpha2]

The iphone is great for simple little casual games, because there;s not much more you can do. you cant make a fighting game for it, forget a decent adventure/action game. Sidescrollers and puzzle games are thethings it;s best at because it's hard to play anything else without a Dpad and buttons and even a sidescroller is pretty hard to do.

Regardless of what strength the iphone might have as a game console the issue lies with the developers, if they can;t figure out a way to make a game as good as they can on another platform they wont.

simply put without decent controls or a more secure platform that;s harder to hack most dev;s are just going to cheap out and phone it in... pun intended.



And bringing it back to Pandora, much the same way you;re not going to have more than 5 people per project, IF that and money wise I doubt anyone;s ever going to become a millionare making pandora games (one can hope but that's still not to likely anytime soon.) So you arnt going to have people spend all day working on textures, you're probably not going to have a coder that can work on it for more than a couple of hours aday between his regular 9 to 5 and watching Lost or something and good luck getting a modeler that has more than a year of experience to build decent looking characters.

If we do see somethin like that, awesome but it's a ways off.

 

[borgqueenx]

yes, if the games i have would have psp graphics...it would be the first iphone game that is great for my eyes a true eye candy so yes i would give alot more money for it.

 

[sketch3r]

And no one mentions the bus? Atari Jag had great CPU and GPU but was strangled by the bus architecture not able to cope with chunking a huge volume of 3 data about. I expect if you got really under the hood with iPhone you would find a similar situation. At the end of the day its not only processing that counts but how you get and deliver the data. PSP is designed with this in mind and the iPhone is sooo much more. Pandora on the other hand has been designed with all this in mind and I'm sure some serios devs, with enough investment could make game that would wipe the floor with the competition (is there any )

 

[Exophase]

And no one mentions the bus? Atari Jag had great CPU and GPU but was strangled by the bus architecture not able to cope with chunking a huge volume of 3 data about. I expect if you got really under the hood with iPhone you would find a similar situation. At the end of the day its not only processing that counts but how you get and deliver the data. PSP is designed with this in mind and the iPhone is sooo much more. Pandora on the other hand has been designed with all this in mind and I'm sure some serios devs, with enough investment could make game that would wipe the floor with the competition (is there any )

Funny, it's the 64bit bus that Jaguar fans usually gloat about. If iPhone really has such severe crippling bus problems for 3D performance then I think a lot of those would translate to Pandora as well. The actual latency on the DDR RAM on the PSP isn't that great and that of the eDRAM used for VRAM doesn't seem tremendously better, though the CPU's access to it could be short-changed compared to the GU.

On the other hand, a lot of this depends on texture cache and what techniques the 3D unit has for hiding latency (USSEs on Pandora's SGX are at least designed to help)... would expect that the tile architecture of PowerVR MBX makes it more memory friendly than whatever's in PSP.

 

[zacaj]

Maybe also it could be because the iPhone's GPU sucks:
- Its designed for power efficiancy, not GFX output
- no stencil buffer=no shadows
- not much RAM
- about 1/30 the polys/sec that the PSP has(doesnt really count, but you know that something with 1/30 anything of another probably cant compete well...)

 

[darkblu]

Maybe also it could be because the iPhone's GPU sucks:

really? lets see.

QUOTE

- Its designed for power efficiancy, not GFX output

i'm yet to see a gpu that is not designed for gfx output, efficiency or not. but yes, the mbx lite is likely more power-efficient than the psp gpu. all that means it gets more work done per watt consumed.

QUOTE

- no stencil buffer=no shadows


you will be surprised to discover there are other ways to do shadows, even better looking ones, than stencil volumes.

QUOTE

- not much RAM


compared to what - your desktop? the iphone has spades of memory more than the psp, even if you considered the os and services tax. and mbx has the better texture compression too.

QUOTE

- about 1/30 the polys/sec that the PSP has(doesnt really count, but you know that something with 1/30 anything of another probably cant compete well...)


first off, part of the problem there is that on the psp you talk pretty much to the metal, whereas on the iphone the driver (and os) overhead has been notorious (good thing there are always system updates). second, iphone gpu has vertex shaders, wich, if used, would allow things you would need to fall back to psp cpu to reproduce. unfortunately, apple do not expose vertex shaders to devs. but if we shift the subject from the qualities of the metal to its software support then the iphone pummels the psp, plain and simple.