iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad game that runs on some Unreal Engine (3?).

I don't even have an iX, but I saw a video of this game running on an iPhone 4 and haven't seen graphics like that in a mobile game before. It's also received positive reviews and user opinions...but have any of you tried it? Mainly I'm just curious about this game because of the technical side of things. Are there any equally fancy Android games (I also don't have an Android phone, just a Nokia that sucks)?

I have it on the iPhone 4. It really is a beautiful game. It is super detailed, even down to imperfections on character's skin and armor. I can't wait for them to do more games based on this engine, it seems to have a lot of potential. As far as actual gameplay, it is fun but does get a bit repetitive of course, seeing as the premise of the game is basically that you start over all the time. Because of the repetitive gameplay, I think it's probably worth $1.99.

It'll be coming to Android soon.

And yes, it's pretty good looking, but the Nintendo 3DS stands to beat it by quite a bit.

But only from very specific viewing angles.

Except we're talking about games on PHONES.

Only if you have the 3D on. 3D isn't required (even in 3D-capable games, as it has a slider to turn it on/off). The graphics are impressive regardless.

Not from the recent trailers I have seen of gameplay footage on the 3DS thus far. Looks like pretty PSP graphics still. That infinity blade engine renders beautifully.

The 3DS has Gamecube-level graphics power, with far more shader power and functionality. A lot of the trailers are pretty crappy quality. The best in my opinion was the MGS or Dead or Alive games. Also keep in mind that it's pulling off said graphics with actual fluid framerates. Most of the better PSP games have awful framerate issues (almost exactly like the PS2 really).

Yeah I wanted PSP to be so much more then it is. Not to mention the games for it are mostly terrible.

Everything I've read says the 3DS is going to use a PICA200 clocked at 133 MHz. The PICA200 looks damn awful. I'm not sure how it has "more shader power and functionality," because it only has 4 vertex shader units (you can *kinda* use them for fragment shaders) and those vertex shader units are so super-slow that the PICA200 gets decimated by the Gamecube's fixed function hardware. The only area in which the 3DS will be comparable to the Gamecube will be raw fillrate.

The 3DS also has to drive a higher-resolution screen than the Gamecube, and you need to divide the CPU and vertex shader performance by the number of views on the parallax barrier filter.


edit: For comparison, the iPhone 4 has a PowerVR SGX 535 which is an unmitigated badass. DirectX 10.1 level features, while the PICA200 is pretty much DirectX 7/8 level features (other than some proprietary extensions they tacked on, but those don't count.)

Don't go confusing the issue with facts and details, we all know Nintendo is king of fast hardware. Just look at the wii.

Apparently, they don't need fast hardware or fancy graphics...

The only way to do a lot of things right is by using a lot of CPU power. It's basically impossible to do a good job for computer vision, speech recognition, motion tracking, autostereoscopic rendering or augmented reality when you have a tiny compute budget.

The fact that Nintendo doesn't feel the need to do their new features in a way that isn't complete unusable **** is probably why I've bought one Nintendo product in the last 3 years.

Edit: Also, there's no source for the 133mhz mark. That was the clock speed of the original DS, not the 3DS. And the 3DS GPU has extensions to give it features comparable to DX10.



Looks pretty good to me!

Besides, using that GPU on the iPhone/etc absolutely destroys battery life.

The Infinity Blade engine still looked more refined to me. Idk.

Also, why does this thread lack main subject video??

http://ds.ign.com/articles/109/1094930p1.html - According to IGN, it will have a DMP PICA200 clocked at 133 MHz and two ARM11 CPUs clocked at 266 MHz.

The thing that really sets DX9 and DX10 apart is fp pixel formats and the PICA200 doesn't support them at all. It looks like the PICA200 has some fixed-function extensions to enable things like per-pixel lighting and refractions, which is nice but it's no substitute.

It was designed to. That's why they hired Futuremark to make it.

That video would have been recorded with a 400 MHz PICA200 running on a pretty powerful test system, which was doing as much of the heavy lifting as possible (software tweening for sure, maybe even software transformations for the whole scene.) Pre-baked cubemap, using alpha blending to fake a gloss map (Futuremark's pretty good at this ****,) one hardware light, very few triangles. Lots of stuff showing off the high fillrate in the fixed function pipeline but there's nothing that indicates it has any more features than a GeForce 1.

And because it's an ad, that one scene is pushing the GPU to the max.

I'm not impressed.

I think it's a good choice for the 3DS due to the high fillrate, but Gamecube quality graphics? You've got to be kidding.

On a similar note, Nintendo has also said the 3DS will have a shorter battery life than previous versions.

I don't know what the hell Jon'C just said but I also am not impressed with that video. It just doesn't seem like a very detailed environment and there's not a whole hell of a lot going on that I would want to showcase.

I am wary of anything made by a benchmark company.