To graphics programmers

Cool, I didn't know /prog/ existed.

Were you impressed with John Carmac's Rage + iPhone demo?

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.

http://imgur.com/yEnBr.jpg

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.

>>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.

Exciting times!