PowerVR MBX in iPhone

Show me where apple have previously confirmed MBX of any sort in the iphone. There has been supposition and assumption, but this is the first official recognition, it is therefore, regardless of your assessment, NEWS for me.

It is also EXCELLENT news if you are a follower of IMG IP, in that it finally confirms that the iphone contains IMG IP as opposed to someone elses IP, it is therefore, regardless of your assessment, EXCELLENT NEWS for me.

 

and hopefully an indicator for more Excellent News in the future....

 

How do mobile game sales stack up against mobile productivity apps. sales?

You only buy a new email client once or twice, maybe something like Opera once.

But you could buy games over and over again, it seems.

So maybe in future models, they'll look at putting in more dedicated gaming silicon?

 

Uhm - 30% for publishing/promo and distribution? Very reasonable.
Ask any band how large a cut they get from sales of their products.

This is a particularly good deal for software developers that are not tied to a publisher. They get 70% of the end-user price, and retain all rights to their product. Add to that the possibility to get funding. If I were a one-man-band, or a small game developer house this would be very attractive proposition indeed.

 

Where in the SDK do you see that?

 

In the iPhone OS Programming Guide under "Drawing with OpenGL ES." There's also several links back to ImgTec in there...

 

How capable is the MBX or MBX Lite?

In a SJ Mercury article, they said games could be more powerful than those on the DS or PSP.

That has to be a misunderstanding by the writer, who was quoting Carmack saying some nice things about the iPhone SDK.

Does the MBX or MBX Lite compare to the Broadband Engine in the PSP?

What other devices are using the MBX and MBX Lite chips

It seems a lot of enthusiasm from games developers to the iPhone SDK is more about what they perceive as the business opportunity, not because the iPhone hardware is that much more capable than any other portable device out there.

About the only thing that stands out is that there are no size restrictions on iPhone applications as there are with other mobile platforms.

Not being able to background processes on iPhone apps. shouldn't matter too much with games.

 

MBX Lite being faster than the PSP's GPU seems like a massive amount of overoptimism to me. DS on the other hand, wouldn't surprise me at all.

Well, the ARM11 core is certainly no weakling; I'm not aware of any shipping mobile phone wiht noticeably more performance than it.

 

http://www.pocketpcfaq.com/videos/Intel-3D-Graphics-Demo.wmv



Twilight is a graphics demo running on the MBX Lite in the Dell Axim X50v. It uses OpenGL ES and was developed by Futuremark.

PowerVR's tile based, deferred shading/texturing graphics architecture is likely a lot more effective with bandwidth and fillrate than either the PSP or DS's design, and its capabilities of unconditional color accuracy for alpha blends, lower penalty AA, DOT3 per-pixel lighting, and up to anisotropic texture filtering give it a more advanced feature set. Being probably multiple times as small in size as the PSP's GPU, though, and probably having lower power consumption likely leaves the iPhone's MBX Lite at around one-third to one-quarter of the PSP's graphics performance.

MBX family processors released ahead by several months of either the DS or PSP back in 2004. That Axim X50v launched back then, employing an MBX Lite that was part of Intel's (now transferred to Marvell) 2700G multimedia dedicated co-processor chip. The 2700G might've been clocked lower than the iPhone's graphics core.

Wikipedia's entry for PowerVR lists a lot of other devices equipped with an MBX processor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powervr

 

1/3 to 1/4 seems pretty low. Is that DC levels? But with better IMG quality?

I wonder how long it takes Futuremark to come out with a benchmark for the iPhone.

 

Remember the Dreamcast?

Considering it used a Series 2 chip at 100 Mhz and it rivaled (in my opinion) the PS2 solution, I think there is still quite a bit of capability in the iPhone/iPod touch graphics hardware.


We'll see exactly what developers can come up with, but I've got high hopes. My concern isn't about the graphics it's more about the control options that are possible. That might be the limiting factor in game software.

 

Producer of Monkeyball was quoted as saying they could get console-quality graphics.

An EA guy said the accelerometer and the big touch screen gave them options, like on-screen buttons.

Would be better if they could use Bluetooth to support control devices as an option.

Would be better still if for the next rev of the iPhone, Apple threw in a couple of shoulder buttons.

Or maybe some kind of feedback to use with virtual buttons.

Could future designs be driven by gaming requirements or more likely, flashy UI effects and video media support?

 

The touch screen and the accelerometer opens possibilities. It will be very different from a PSP, but that may well be for the better.

The sheer number of downloads of the SDK is staggering. 100000 in four days. Of course, only a small fraction will ever develop anything, but it still indicates an amazing interest!

 

Yep, I totally agree Entropy.

I personally want a 'real' PDF eBook reader. My thoughts were you could use the standard music navigation ... pushing play would start an auto scroll, forward/reverse would navigate by page, the chapter/track navigation would go navigate by chapters. Holding play and pressing forward or reverse would adjust scroll speed... and of course a TOC where you could go to any page/chapter in the book...

The only 'proble' would be getting the PDF files onto the iPod/iPhone...

(of course that application has nothing to do with the graphics chip... so I'll just be quiet now )

 

The performance of iPhone's MBX Lite should be well short of Dreamcast's, too. Similar to Dreamcast, though, it displays with superior image qualities compared to PSP.

 

@Lazy, are you inferring N64 level with good IQ? Or more like somewhere between N64 and DC. I was always under the impression that the DS was a mini N64, is that accurate as well?

@MoHonRi, the iPhone/Touch are powerful, but from what Lazy is saying, not that powerful.

 

lazy, do you know if the x50v has a VGP-class part, or TnL is all sw?

 

I think it may be the Intel part which has no VGP.

 

Yes, the 2700G doesn't have VGP.

 

thanks for the input, guys.