Sweeney described conventional game consoles as seeing "a 10-20x leap in performance every 7-8 years," compared to the 9x leap Apple claimed for the iPad 2 in just one annual refresh.
This is true, but it's not "astonishing". Conventional game consoles usually push the limits of graphics when they're first released. The iPad didn't push graphics when it was first released, so Apple had a lot of room for "easy" GPU improvement with the iPad 2. Whether we continue to see order-of-magnitude leaps in performance depends on how much "head-room" is left in mobile GPUs, and how improvements in conventional GPUs trickle down to mobile devices.
Hmm.. it must be even harder to develop for such a fragmented platform as the personal computer, then, where there is essentially nothing guaranteed except the OS you are writing for.
It is really hard. John Carmack has been talking for years about how much easier it is to get good performance out of a console, where the hardware is a known quantity, than on Windows, where you have to make really difficult tradeoffs based on the dozens of differences between hardware configurations.
iPhone is easier like consoles. Android is harder like PCs.
I'm not a hardware guy, but it's been my understanding that this is why drivers exist. Drivers are a nightmare, though. I don't miss dealing with them.
Drivers may provide you semantic uniformity over a diverse set of hardware, but I think Sweeny sounds more interested in performance guarantees, which they may not be able to provide, depending both on the hardware and how well the driver has been optimized.
Optimizations could provide "a factor of 4 driver overhead reduction," he estimated, noting that the current software allows mobile games to look great but restricts them from rendering "a whole lot of objects" on the screen at once.
Anybody know why?
EDIT: I'm guessing because GLES doesn't support geometry shaders (even though the PowerVR SGX chipset does)
There's a lot that happens behind the scenes of a modern graphics API. For example, issuing a draw call may cause the driver to incur a flush of accumulated state changes, patch an existing shader, or even trigger a shader re-compile. Cutting down on what happens behind the scenes will allow developers to issue more draw calls within the same time and put more objects on the screen.
DirectX 9 had a similar problem of expensive draw calls but it was compounded by drivers living in kernel-space requiring an expensive context switch when draw calls were issued.
Reminds me of this article that popped up on here last week: http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-ban...
In that case the drivers were too abstracted and to really eek performance out of the ps1 over what others were doing at the time they had to bypass graphics drivers from sony.
The drivers for 3d on early iOS devices were ridiculously inefficient, doing things like copying every vertex repeatedly and turning indexed meshes into regular vertex streams on the main cpu. If this hasn't changed it would easily provide the 4x speedup sweeney describes.
If you have an iPhone 4, and you haven't played Infinity Blade, it's a great game and looks beautiful. I am on the verge of buying an iPad 2 for two reasons. 1. I lost my iPad and have a bunch of software I paid for. 2. Infinity blade on a bigger screen.
That doesn't really make sense. Apple has the same access to GPU's as Android manufacturers have, so there really aren't any 'Android GPU's' they should have a look at.
Their problem with Android is that the hardware they're building for is inconsistent, and that will remain so until some kind of policy change happens with Android. It has nothing to do with the power of (future) hardware itself.
Actually, Apple locks up supply channels to buy display and chipset components exclusively. They essentially get "first pick" because of their volume. But that might change in the near future.
Those benchmarks don't look that hot when compared to the benchmarks Anandtech did with the iPad 2, even with its higher res. screen (more than 2x the pixels).
It IS Mac vs PC all over again. The main reason PC "won" initially was because it got the consumer mindshare first and became more rapidly adopted by the masses.
As for the specs you're throwing out: my mom doesn't care about specs, cores, or whatever a GPU-whatsitdoozy is. Android will win with the hardcore nerd/tech-enthusiast like the 360/PS3 won with the hardcore gamer... Apple/Nintendo is for everyone else.
This is true, but it's not "astonishing". Conventional game consoles usually push the limits of graphics when they're first released. The iPad didn't push graphics when it was first released, so Apple had a lot of room for "easy" GPU improvement with the iPad 2. Whether we continue to see order-of-magnitude leaps in performance depends on how much "head-room" is left in mobile GPUs, and how improvements in conventional GPUs trickle down to mobile devices.