Were you impressed with John Carmac's Rage + iPhone demo?
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Anonymous2010-08-16 23:27
Not really. Both the CPU and GPU in the iPhone 4 is far superior to that in the PSP3000, Nintendo 3DS, or PS2... in fact, the GPU (custom implementation of a PowerVR SGX on a 32nm process) is better than the GPU of the PS3. The PS3 obviously has a much better CPU though.
>>4
Yeah, and here's the kicker. New iPod with the same hardware as the iPhone 4 is coming out next month, and Apple is also launching their XBox Live like content distribution and online multiplayer gaming service called Game Center.
Here's a screen shot from the iOS 4.1 Beta SDK documentation.
It appears that Apple is about to go head-to-head against Sony and Nintendo in hand-held gaming. And they have the hardware to do it.
Disclaimer: I'm not an Apple fan. I'm an iPhone and Android developer, it's how I make a living, and I also have a Pandora kit at home for hobby programming.
>>5
You really didn't need to include a disclaimer - we can see just fine that you're using Windows and that you have /g/ opened in another tab. Why don't you go back there, please?
>>9
There is no reason for that image to be a PNG.
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Anonymous2010-08-17 4:31
>>10
A large percentage of iPhone users buys iPhones for the games (I'd say between 15-20%). I can tell from being a mobile game developer and from having seen quite a few iPhone owners in my time.
>>3,4
No shit eh? My video card does not even have geometry shaders.
There was an article a while back saying that pretty soon, all cellphones will have OpenCL, and the killer app for that will be gaming. I tend to agree. Soon you won't have specific 'shaders' anymore in a traditional rasterization pipeline; gamedev studios will just write their own complete rendering pipelines with OpenCL, and OpenGL will be dead. I don't necessarily agree that it will happen so soon, but it will happen. Here's the article: http://blogs.arm.com/multimedia/why-opencl-will-be-on-every-smartphone-in-2014/
Desktop gaming will go the same way very soon as well. A number of people have written voxel rendering engines with CUDA (NVidia has a demo of this). id Tech 6, Carmack's game after Rage, is going to use this with raytracing for the terrain, and will render characters and such using traditional rasterization.
>>12 Joint Photographic Experts Group. Not a photograph. Screenshot of my desktop as a test. JPEG 201938 bytes. PNG 150058 bytes. PNG is lossless.
You're an idiot.
It was nice and all, but it was all just pretty textures.
Mobile GPUs are pretty full-featured, but they have the processing power of a damp matchbox. The guy comparing it to PS3 is on crack, and mind you that's with the PS3 offloading a lot of the graphics to the CPU.
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Anonymous2010-08-17 9:04
>>18
Feeling bad about your PSP purchase? Feel like you need to justify it?
There is a lot to be said for combining all your mobile devices into a swiss army knife. No one likes to carry around a separate cellphone, mp3 player, PDA, GPS, etc. Same goes for mobile games.
Like it or not, smartphones and handheld consoles are merging. Nintendo already sees this; I'd bet my life savings their next mobile product is a phone, or that they will license mobile gaming technology to phone manufacturers. It would not surprise me at all if Sony can't figure this out, given how badly they fucked up the PS3. The only reason anyone bought that thing in the first two years was for Blu-ray.
>>20
I didn't care about blue ray or gaming. I did care about Linux on the Cell. I shelled out premium price for the original PS3.
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Anonymous2010-08-17 11:07
>>17
I think you mean if Sony wasn't so concerned about locking you into their shitty hardware platforms the $SonyProduct would be more successful.
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Anonymous2010-08-17 11:18
>>20
I'm not that guy but I bought a PSP and a DS to play games. I actually do carry those two and an iPod with me (I usually take my backpack). But then again I don't carry my phone with me and almost use it exclusively as a fancy alarm clock (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-otEdq-Ozo this never fails to wake me up).
No, I don't like portable consoles and phones merging at all. It means the death of good portable games if all we have is a touchscreen. As far Nintendo seeing this happening, well, wouldn't they have made the 3DS a phone if the did? It's probably gonna be 5 years until it gets a successor.
>>23
Well I guess they got really cocky after they crushed everyone with the PS2. I don't care, I don't own Sony stock. As long as they make good games (which they do) - I'm happy.
Oh, [i]geometry shaders[i]. That thing must be a monster. Next purchase: some Intel integrated graphics. They have DirectX 10.1 support, they must be awesome.
I mean, PowerVR promises 14 MPolys/s on that incredible chip. That's like, one hundredth of what a mid-range mobile graphics card done by a real company will get you today. Now you have enough power to run games similar to what we had in 2003. I'm sure these geometry shaders will come quite handy in there.
Next thing you know these awesome ARMs will get you an twentieth of the performance of an i5.
It's a mobile chip. It consumes little power, that's good. But performance? Get real.
>>5 It appears that Apple is about to go head-to-head against Sony and Nintendo in hand-held gaming. And they have the hardware to do it.
You mean they finally have the hardware to go against a 6 year old portable console!? [code]wow...
>>29
Please optimize your quotes! It appears that Apple is about to go head-to-head against Sony and Nintendo in hand-held gaming.
And they have the hardware to do it.
Incidentally, I wonder if the 3DS won't be fun to program, assuming it's cracked promptly.
Wonder why no general pixel shaders, though. National pride? Or right pleasedness with the miserable state of Nintendo console emulation?
>>24 No, I don't like portable consoles and phones merging at all. It means the death of good portable games if all we have is a touchscreen.
No it doesn't. Look at this: http://icontrolpad.com/
>>40
Because this sort of idea-inbreeding is detrimental to the state of our board. Though looking at its quality in recent times, I wonder if it could be lowered further.
>>42
It'd be less shit, if people would stop filling it with complaints about how it's shit.
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Anonymous2010-08-17 18:39
>>26
Are you being serious right now? These features are far more important than the number of polys it can render.
Did you know that the PSP, DSi, and Wii do not even have programmable shaders? The graphics Carmack just demonstrated on the iPhone are not possible on any of these platforms.
That's like, one hundredth of what a mid-range mobile graphics card done by a real company will get you today. Now you have enough power to run games similar to what we had in 2003.
It's a fucking PHONE. A PHONE. A mobile device. Smaller than the size of your hand. Geez.
>>42
I have found /prog/ to be much better whenever I put effort into making a thread, which involves picking a topic that is usefully discussable and interesting.
If people did that enough, >>43's point would be more obvious: imagine someone at LtU (or some other forum with high SNR) bitching about the odd garbage thread started by a newcomer. Everyone would agree that the complaint would be pointless also.
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Anonymous2010-08-17 19:07
>>41
The dpad on that looks fucking horrible. Almost as bad as the one on the 360 controller. The whole thing attached to the iPhone is really ugly which goes against the appeal of Apple products. But if you'd really want portable gaming that badly you'd just get a PSP or a DS or even a Gameboy.
>>44 Did you know that the PSP, DSi, and Wii do not even have programmable shaders? The graphics Carmack just demonstrated on the iPhone are not possible on any of these platforms.
The difference is those platforms have some great games. The tech demo was impressive but you don't play tech demos, you play games.
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Anonymous2010-08-17 19:41
>>48 The dpad on that looks fucking horrible.
This is the very first prototype example of a D-pad, made by a bunch of backyard hackers with zero funding. Did you miss the part where Apple are making their own?
Sorry to burst your bubble, but portable game consoles are dead. They have merged into the smartphone, alongside so many other portable technologies. It is only a matter of time now. Welcome to the future.
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Anonymous2010-08-17 19:58
>>49 Sorry to burst your bubble, but portable game consoles are dead.
I'll consider them dead when I see Nintendo franchises on smartphones. You do realize the PSP and DS sold almost 200 million units combined (that's hardly dead) and the 3DS will also sell a lot thanks to it's 3D gimmick.
>>50
I'm not endorsing >>49's comment, but Sony's doing the phone thing (and the compromise doesn't seem too horrid IMO) and Nintendo is doing the feeling-out-phones thing again.
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Anonymous2010-08-17 20:13
>>51
The Sony phone thing has been a rumor for years now. Also there was a rumor about PSP2 for like a year now. Until Sony tells us what they're doing, it's pure speculation.
>>44
So is the PSP and it's graphics are still comparable, yet the PSP is 6 years old.
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Anonymous2010-08-17 23:29
>>50 You do realize the PSP and DS sold almost 200 million units combined
Yeah no shit, they both launched almost six years ago. This is three times as long as iPhone OS 2 has existed. Of course they were successful; at the time they were the only way to play mobile 3D games.
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Anonymous2010-08-17 23:39
>>55
Uhh no, they are not comparable at all. The iPhone 4 has more than ten times the RAM of the PSP. It has more than five times the resolution. It has a CPU running a much more modern architecture and instruction set at triple the clock speed. It has a dedicated programmable GPU supporting normal mapping, per-pixel lighting, etc. The PSP has none of these things.
The iPhone 4 is brand new and the games already look much better than PSP. Seriously watch the video the OP is talking about:
>>61
The first two videos made me laugh; you couldn't possibly think they look anything like Carmack's demo. It took until the third video for me to realize you were trolling :(
>>44
Uhh... Rage's not taxing at all on the graphics side. The technology works by reading a unique texture foe everything in the world. Since each texel is unique, it comes pre-shaded and pre-lit.
The advantage is that it can look as good as you want and it'll be cheap on the hardware. The disadvantage is that it's completely static, you can't even move lights so the shadows move around.
The trick is loading the right textures at the right mipmap levels at the right time. And also storing the huge amount of data on disk (this is the biggest problem I see for an iPhone app). But the rendering itself is pretty simple. It does use pixel shaders, but only to ease the transition between several texture tiles at different qualities and stuff like that.
What you're saying does sound mostly true for the environment. You are correct that doing intelligent asynchronous texture swapping is probably the most difficult issue in creating rich environments given the low texture memory of an iPhone 4 compared to its screen size.
But lots of iPhone games have non-static shadows with moving lights and such (especially racing games), so just because Carmack didn't demonstrate it there doesn't mean he can't do it. Also, the characters in that video looked way too smoothly shaded; they are almost certainly normal-mapped. It's a relatively cheap way of making a dozen box-shaped polygons look like an awesomely detailed mesh, and I guarantee they will be using it for characters on the iPhone.
>>67
The engine can do it in the sense that you can use models, and these models use straightforward shadow mapping. In the iPhone demo it looks like some kind of blob shadow, or some very low resolution shadow map on the characters. Since I didn't see any trace of self-shadowing or shadows on uneven surfaces, I'm betting on blobs.
However most of the lightning and shadowing is static by design. That's the engine's strength. Apart from unique texturing, it allows stuff such as proper radiosity that would be too expensive to do real-time.
I don't really know what you are trying to imply with "they are almost certainly normal-mapped". It's not unusual to use different methods for the world and models, and everybody uses normal-mapped models now. Normal mapping does not require pixel shaders; Doom3 worked just fine (image quality-wise) on a GeForce2 (with bump&specular), and several games use bump-mapping on the GC/Wii.
>>67 making a dozen box-shaped polygons look like an awesomely detailed mesh This has its limitations too. The edges/silhouette are going to look awful if you take this too far, like Doom3 did. For human-like models to look decent, on top of the normal mapping you have to spend in the neighborhood of 10K polygons. And if you want them to look awesome (MGS4, Crysis), you'll need about 50K. There's no way around that.
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Anonymous2010-08-18 10:25
>There's no way around that.
Unlimited Detail+Infinite Compression
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Anonymous2010-08-18 12:01
You know how shitty iPhone games are? I couldn't find a single video on youtube of an iPhone game with Drowning Pool - Let the bodies hit the floor playing in the background.
>>68 I don't really know what you are trying to imply with "they are almost certainly normal-mapped". It's not unusual to use different methods for the world and models, and everybody uses normal-mapped models now.
Yeah that's pretty much exactly what I meant. Not sure where the confusion is. I mentioned it because the PSP and DS don't support normal mapping; their characters cannot look that good.
Normal mapping does not require pixel shaders; Doom3 worked just fine (image quality-wise) on a GeForce2 (with bump&specular)
Doom3 worked on a GeForce 2 because it disabled normal mapping on it. I know because I played it on one.
It is possible to do normal mapping in certain scenarios if the video card supports a few extensions; for example the OpenGL DOT3 extension is one of them, but it requires normal maps in world space (not relative to each polygon), so you cannot use it with animated characters. In the general case, no, it requires pixel shaders.
>>74
You were most certainly doing something wrong then. Doom3 was feature-complete on GeForce2 hardware, including per light bump-mapping, specular highlighting, and stencil shadowing.
Watch the second part of that video and tell me what is missing according to you.
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Anonymous2010-08-18 22:25
>>76
The video quality there is too terrible to tell (even at 480p); the only thing that actually moves around is the spider. You might be right about that, but GeForce2 definitely did not support programmable shaders. It only supports DirectX 7 features. So if it is fully featured, then I don't know what extensions they used to pull that off.
The GeForce 2 also formally introduces the NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer (NSR), a primitive type of programmable pixel pipeline that is somewhat similar to later pixel shaders.
For example, Opera 6.10 now has standard features that support Geolocation and webM HTML5 video. Support is also given Opera on HTML 5 Appcache technology and Web Workers that allows the use of a browser for a broader application, such as word processors, image editors and others.
>>81,83
Problem statement: No one uses Lisp.
Proposed solution: Everyone uses Lisp, they just don't know1 it.
Status: Accepted.
1. Presented solution is derived from original proposed solution.
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Anonymous2010-10-23 22:23
Doesn't the N900 or the N8 have geometry shaders too?
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Anonymous2010-10-24 11:51
>>34
The 3DS has general shaders to hasten and cheapen the development process. Instead of a company making their own shaders (and requiring a good programmer) they can have basically a scripter (a cheap programmer), and spend the rest on artists, or hopefully, people who will make good gameplay (there will probably be many engines for the 3ds, I wouldn't be surprised if Unreal came out with a version, especially with the first 3d gaming console)
One example of their general shaders ia a lighting one. How much time and money would normally be spent on making a lighting algorithm, something which has been done 1000x before, and in every situation requires bugtesting, patching, etc?