4 years later, iPhone graphics still worse than PSP

[I.S.T.]

I remember seeing the iPhone and thought it had very bad texture filtering, but I'm spoiled by the PC.
This is unrelated to software libraries, abstraction and all. But it is probably one way they save trannies.
I've played a bit of original Playstation and was quite shocked. The GPU has almost no feature whatsoever

Well, it did come out in 1994 originally...

 

[compres]

Well, it did come out in 1994 originally...

IMO even back then it looked terrible. Late games improved a lot though.

Back then we had the voodoo2 onthe pc if I recall, which looked soo much better.

 

[I.S.T.]

IMO even back then it looked terrible. Late games improved a lot though.

Back then we had the voodoo2 onthe pc if I recall, which looked soo much better.

Not in 1994! The first VooDoo card came out in 96.

Two year difference is huge in the PC world, after all... Of course it's going to be much better.

 

[DemoCoder]

Biggest irritation of iPhone 3D is that it doesn't support stencil buffer.

 

[sethk]

A proper PSP 2 (instead of that half-baked PSP Go) with proper buttons and iPhone-like hardware innards would just blow the old PSP out of the water. It wouldn't budge the iPhone crowd though, since they want an iPhone, not a games machine.

Sony is pretty conservative in terms of half-generation upgrades with new capabilities, which would essentially split their software market in half - unlike Nintendo, which has done this for quite some time. The DSi has new hardware and can run games that will not run on the DS. The same was true for GB -> GBC -> GBA (see here - http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/systems/gameboy/compatibilitychart.jsp). While I have no doubt that an eventual new handheld from Sony will have vastly superior capabilities, the launch of the recent PSP Go makes me think that they have chosen to post-pone that true platform upgrade for a few years, at least. I think we are stuck with the PSP spec for the short term. In the meanwhile, we will see more and more phone launches in the next few years where these new phones are more capable (at a pure theoretical level) than the PSP, even if their lack of input capabilities will make them sub-standard gaming devices for the hardcore, IMHO.

Unless Microsoft decides to enter the portable gaming race (which I see no signs of), I can't see anything other than the iPhone threatening the PSP as the portable gaming device with the best graphics, and iPhone games will mostly cater to people buying < $10 games, and remain fully compatible with pre-3GS iPhones, essentially guaranteeing that they will have lower production values than AAA PSP games.

 

[Blazkowicz]

I imagine a future PSP would use a Tegra or similar chip of then, giving the magnitude of order improvment over those new phones and older handheld consoles.

but.. I'm deciding I'm not liking handheld consoles as well as high end phones. the first ones are propiertary hardware crippled with DRM, the latter ones are gimmicks ruining your (oversized) phone's battery life and tied to your cell phone oligarchy's extorsion fees.

I'd be more interested in an open platform.

 

[compres]

I imagine a future PSP would use a Tegra or similar chip of then, giving the magnitude of order improvment over those new phones and older handheld consoles.

but.. I'm deciding I'm not liking handheld consoles as well as high end phones. the first ones are propiertary hardware crippled with DRM, the latter ones are gimmicks ruining your (oversized) phone's battery life and tied to your cell phone oligarchy's extorsion fees.

I'd be more interested in an open platform.

I have to say I feel the same.

How good/bad is the android as an platform?

 

[Ailuros]

I imagine a future PSP would use a Tegra or similar chip of then, giving the magnitude of order improvment over those new phones and older handheld consoles.

The possibility of that magnitude of improvement is there for SONY's next generation handheld, the IP just doesn't come from NVIDIA. If you're looking for Tegra IP in next generation handhelds you probably will have to concentrate on NINTENDO's corner

 

[compres]

The possibility of that magnitude of improvement is there for SONY's next generation handheld, the IP just doesn't come from NVIDIA. If you're looking for Tegra IP in next generation handhelds you probably will have to concentrate on NINTENDO's corner

Really? I would have guessed they were still with ATI given their GPU in past consoles.

Did they announce any nVidia deal recently?

 

[Ailuros]

Really? I would have guessed they were still with ATI given their GPU in past consoles.

Did they announce any nVidia deal recently?

Neither/nor have been announced yet and I'd say that it'll still take some time until they are. But I'm as confident as I can be that SONY's next generation handheld will use a SGX543 MP variant and NINTENDO a Tegra variant.

 

[compres]

Neither/nor have been announced yet and I'd say that it'll still take some time until they are. But I'm as confident as I can be that SONY's next generation handheld will use a SGX543 MP variant and NINTENDO a Tegra variant.

If that is the case then it is a big loss for ATI and a nice win for the green team. I would have guessed the next handheld from Nintendo would have ATI graphics similar to the Wii/Gamecube, therefore making ports "easy".

 

[Simon F]

Biggest irritation of iPhone 3D is that it doesn't support stencil buffer.

I presume you mean OpenGL ES 1.x which is due to MBX not having a stencil buffer. SGX, OTOH, has pretty much every bell and whistle.

 

[Xmas]

I remember seeing the iPhone and thought it had very bad texture filtering, but I'm spoiled by the PC.
This is unrelated to software libraries, abstraction and all. But it is probably one way they save trannies.

Are you sure what you saw was hardware accelerated and actually using proper filtering (as opposed to, say, deliberately not using mipmaps or using point sampling, for whatever reason)? Or do you mean compared to anisotropic filtering?

 

[flynn]

I have to say I feel the same.

How good/bad is the android as an platform?

I've programmed both the PSP and Android (on an HTC G1) and decided to stick to the PSP.

Android uses a bastardized version of Java and all the performance depends on how good the underlying libraries are, which are nothing to write home about. You can write native code libraries and use a JNI-like interface but it's PITA to maintain them.

I found 3D performance to be really poor. If you decide to skip their framework entirely you can, sort of, touch the metal, but it's too time consuming and not really worth it as it will most like not work if you switch hardware.

On the PSP (homebrew) you can either use pspgu library or roll your own. Pspgu is usually good enough in many cases. I usually program 90% C code and a bit of assembler. For hobby programming it's way more fun, for me at least.

 

[corysama]

AFAICT: At least on the MBX versions, Apple's OGL driver leaves much to be desired... It has to copy the vertex data for every draw call (VBOs don't help) and the copy loop is very slow. One of the Unity guys figured out a non-shippable way to do the copy himself and got a 3X speed up. Here's a video of him talking about it: http://vimeo.com/6064955

VBOs do cache vertex data on the SGX. I haven't had a chance to play with one of those yet.

 

[edepot]

Next iPhone GPU update probably in September 2011

I think I forgot to mention some things in my initial post. From looking at the history of the releases and the performance upgrade of each generation of the GPU in the iPhones, you can assume that iPhone technology generations happen each year around September. The GPU gets updated about every two years (it takes time to add in software support for drastic changes in graphics hardware). Check out the iPhone Secrets link at the bottom for actual release dates for each model if you need confirmation on this trend.

So...

If the trend is right, the next iPhone GPU update will happen in September 2011. There may not be time next year (September 2010) for Apple to put in a totally new GPU. Going with this, in 2011, the GPU change increases the performance 10-fold (see previous post). The iPhone 4G (or 3G Sx2) will probably have a 10 times increase in triangles. Which will make the next iPhone about 3 times more powerful than the original PSP (6 1/2 years later). In the mean time the PSP2 has two years to cook up a better MIPS (or maybe some say SGX?) CPU solution. It is difficult to say if MIPS will still be used to maintain backwards compatibility.

If Apple does not change the GPU by next September 2010 (which is likely), then the PSP will have maintained the performance crown for more than 6 whole years. Normal PC graphics cards surpass console graphics usually within 1 to 1 1/2 years of console release date. Each console generation lasts about 6 years these days (PlayStation brand for example). The PSP seems to have bucked this trend of being quickly outdated (performance wise) in the mobile sector. Perhaps that is why PSP Go and not PSP2 was released just recently.

With iPhone going solely after adult gamers (kids don't have credit cards to purchase iPhone mobile plans and iTunes apps), and the PSP going after almost everyone else, perhaps there may be some big changes happening as they start stepping on each other. Maybe the Apps Store model will change as well in the interim...
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=55310

If Apple crams in a new GPU next September, then they may have finally closed the graphics gap with PSP after 5 1/2 years. That is a long time, considering Moore's Law. If they do, it better have more than 3X performance increase, or it will not exceed what the current PSP is capable of in the 3D graphics arena.


Oh, I noticed that the PSP Slim and later models had 4MB eDRAM in the main CPU and an extra 4 eDRAM in the second CPU (Media Engine), which I've corrected in the link below. Also, the iPhone OS (and all OS X in general) is slower than traditional operating systems because it inherited message passing (instead of function calls) from Objective C, which is a big performance hit. Passing messages is very slow compared to regular C parameter function calls (which PSP uses). Lastly, the iPhone and PSP are already on a collision course because PSP Minis are coming out and Sony Ericsson may put out a phone version (in addition to the already supported Skype).

 

[Simon F]

One of the Unity guys figured out a non-shippable way to do the copy himself and got a 3X speed up. Here's a video of him talking about it: http://vimeo.com/6064955

IIRC, his assumptions about the VGP are incorrect. It should be running at (up to) 1 instruction per clock including DP4s.

 

[Blazkowicz]

Are you sure what you saw was hardware accelerated and actually using proper filtering (as opposed to, say, deliberately not using mipmaps or using point sampling, for whatever reason)? Or do you mean compared to anisotropic filtering?

I don't know. perhaps "dirty filtering" as on a Riva 128, XGI volari V8 (if you remember that glorious turd), "performance" mode and filtering hacks on nvidia/ati hardware etc. The lack of anti-aliasing felt crude too.

but in the end it's more about expectations, you have to think about the iphone as a decent but not great 3D device.

 

[Ailuros]

I don't know. perhaps "dirty filtering" as on a Riva 128, XGI volari V8 (if you remember that glorious turd), "performance" mode and filtering hacks on nvidia/ati hardware etc. The lack of anti-aliasing felt crude too.

but in the end it's more about expectations, you have to think about the iphone as a decent but not great 3D device.

Mobile games have in their majority crappy textures; I haven't noticed any filtering hacks up to now but I'm not insisting either that it isn't the case.

Anyway when was the last time you touched a game on a regular console? Cause antialiasing is either rare or completely absent there too in the wide majority of cases. I guess those aren't great 3D devices either

 

[Lazy8s]

A TBDR like MBX is proficient at anti-aliasing comparatively, but Apple requires the image to be output to a texture, I believe, to allow for compositing with displays from the iPhone OS, which circumvents functionality for the AA such as multisampling.

The approximately 20 mm^2 of size and 166 MHz of clock rate of the GPU core in the PSP put it closer in cost to the graphics processor of a notebook computer than a mobile phone. Not only was its performance never ahead of the technological curve, a design like the MBX family, which launched in products like the Dell Axim X50v ahead of the PSP's release in 2004, far outperform it for a given cost.