Phone performance

Myshra · 11 Oct 2011 at 15:57

Try looking at it from the studio point of view. You have 3 handsets in current sale, 4S, 4 and 3S. Lets pretend in 3 months the split is something like (HUGE GUESS) 25/55/20 and you want to make money. Where are you going to draw the line with regard to how taxing you make your game on the current hardware?

I'd imagine most of the new stuff that comes out will aim for solid playability on the 4, either a framerate+ or extra shaders for the 4s and ignore the 3 due to screensize/age but it's always about money at the end of the day. This ignores factors like portability to another OS/tablets etc...

Pottsey · 11 Oct 2011 at 16:05

ghost101 said:
So you're suggesting waiting a year+ for that to appear. Even TI's roadmaps only show 543 appearing later next year.

http://www.arm.com/products/multimedia/mali-graphics-hardware/mali-400-mp.php

Mali400MP is scalable to 4 cores. That's a lot of gpu processing power.

A few companies have it in the roadmap for 2012 and I was hoping Apple would bring out an Ipad3 and Iphone 5 based on it in 2012. Sure it’s at least 6months away but with a generation jump so close I wouldn’t want to be locked into a 12+month contract right now. This will not be like the past few years, we are talking a massive jump in speed.

Glaucus · 11 Oct 2011 at 16:10

That's why you buy outright, especially with apple as phone networks take the pee.

kona786 · 11 Oct 2011 at 16:38

ghost101 said:
Nothing will be beating SGX543 cores anytime soon. Maybe multiple Mali400 cores will give it trouble.

The new PSP has 4 of the SGX543 cores.

Did you read:

kona786 said:
GPU delelopment in the mobile sector is progressing rapidly - next year Qualcomm's New Snapdragon S4 (Adreno 225 gpu) will be even faster, with the GPU more than twice as fast as the ipad2 (PowerVR SGX 543MP2) - (48 GFLOPS vs 19.2 GFLOPS @ 300MHz)

Alpherah · 11 Oct 2011 at 16:49

At risk of sounding like I'm repeating the same thing in every thread:
Honestly mobile technology's progressing too fast for the software to keep up at the moment, its going to reach a point very soon where it flatlines whilst waiting for software to catch up, just like the PC did.

Glaucus · 11 Oct 2011 at 16:57

Already has IMO. Other than opening something up marginally faster. W8 may change that, but will have to see how big apps pan out and if they change to metro. As well as what wp8 will be like as there's no details.

Robbo · 11 Oct 2011 at 16:58

Alpherah said:
At risk of sounding like I'm repeating the same thing in every thread:
Honestly mobile technology's progressing too fast for the software to keep up at the moment, its going to reach a point very soon where it flatlines whilst waiting for software to catch up, just like the PC did.

It's already at that point. Just look at Android, tons of power, sod all that uses it.

At least with the iPhone you can get some really fancy games to show your friends, nice. :cool:

sarge78 · 11 Oct 2011 at 17:00

^ Your both wrong, what about stuff like Photoshop touch? That's crippled by slow mobile processors and limited memory.

sarge78 · 11 Oct 2011 at 17:01

Robbo said:
IAt least with the iPhone you can get some really fancy games to show your friends, nice.

Until they whip out a PS Vita? :cool:

Robbo · 11 Oct 2011 at 17:08

sarge78 said:
^ Your both wrong, what about stuff like Photoshop touch? That's crippled by slow mobile processors and limited memory.

People will have to suffer Photoshop non-touch for the time being

sarge78 said:
Until they whip out a PS Vita?

I don't know anybody that wants one, plus, it's not a phone!

Guest2 · 11 Oct 2011 at 17:09

nikeair94 said:
If you are going to buy the iPhone 4s as a new phone (not an upgrade from iPhone 4) then it isn't too bad a deal. But if you are just wanting to upgrade then I would stick with the iPhone 4. No need to spend hundreds more on a few practically unneeded features.

Bought it as new phone (Currently got a 3GS)

Unneeded features maybe at the moment but if developers program some good things (which im presuming they will as there is such high demand for the 4S) then chances are we will see games and apps that are miles ahead of the iphone 4 (and probabl wont work on iphone 4 or at bes, very slowly)

Means it is actually needed

Out of interest, whats the most powerful app/game thats been made to run on all the power of the Galaxy S2?

Von Luck · 11 Oct 2011 at 17:10

Alpherah · 11 Oct 2011 at 17:15

sarge78 said:
^ Your both wrong, what about stuff like Photoshop touch? That's crippled by slow mobile processors and limited memory.

One single app

and its supposedly running smooth as silk on the Tab 10.1, so i expect the iPad 2 version will do also.
So what will that mean 6 months down the line when all the hardware is 60% quicker again? pointless speed bumps.

FatalSaviour · 11 Oct 2011 at 17:54

Looking *very* nice! But at the end of the day, I'm still very happy with my iPhone 4. As long as iOS 5 doesn't lag it out (and I'm assuming it *shouldn't*), I'm content with waiting another year to see what that will bring to the table.

Von Luck · 11 Oct 2011 at 18:01

grudas · 11 Oct 2011 at 18:09

Robbo said:
The 4S (as demonstrated) is actually a very good upgrade, it is absolutely more than powerful enough to last a good couple of years, if not more.

The issue with people being 'disappointed' is that they wanted an all new design and a larger screen (4").

If you can look past the 3.5" screen, it's a very powerful bit of kit.

well the thing is.. that all the apps run on every iphone anyway.. its not like android where you can feel the slow downs in games/apps which require more hardware power :] on iOS everything runs smooth on every device I've seen.

SKILL · 11 Oct 2011 at 18:32

kona786 said:
GPU delelopment in the mobile sector is progressing rapidly - next year Qualcomm's New Snapdragon S4 (Adreno 225 gpu) will be even faster, with the GPU more than twice as fast as the ipad2 (PowerVR SGX 543MP2) - (48 GFLOPS vs 19.2 GFLOPS @ 300MHz)

You can't exactly compare the two by raw figures, the 225 is architecturally the same as the 220, but with efficiency improvements, as the 220 doesn't come anywhere near the 543MP2 I seriously doubt the 225 is going to change that.

Probably also worth noting that, iirc, the PowerVR chips are the only Tile Based Rendering chips, everything else is Immediate Mode Rendering (with some of the idea's from TBR), and TBR takes significantly less grunt to achieve the same performance.

muon · 11 Oct 2011 at 18:54

kona786 said:
Did you read:

I did read. The anandtech article says its simply an revision improvement (higher clock speed) on adreno 220 which also has high raw specs.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4940/qualcomm-new-snapdragon-s4-msm8960-krait-architecture/3

Architecturally the Adreno 225 and 220 are identical. Adreno 2xx is a DX9-class unified shader design. There's a ton of compute on-board with eight 4-wide vector units and eight scalar units. Each 4-wide vector unit is capable of a maximum of 8 MADs per clock, while each scalar unit is similarly capable of 2 MADs per clock. That works out to 160 floating point operations per clock, or 32 GFLOPS at 200MHz.

...

With Adreno 225 Qualcomm improves performance along two vectors, the first being clock speed. While Adreno 220 (used in the MSM8660) ran at 266MHz, Adreno 225 runs at 400MHz thanks to 28nm. Secondly, Qualcomm tells us Adreno 225 is accompanied by "significant driver improvements". Keeping in mind the sheer amount of compute potential of the Adreno 22x family, it only makes sense that driver improvements could unlock a lot of performance. Qualcomm expects the 225 to be 50% faster than the outgoing 220

So 50% improvement if you believe Qualcomm.

kona786 · 11 Oct 2011 at 22:39

Von Luck said:
I wasn't refering to dual cores, but GPU browser acceleration - which I believe is due in ICS?

thats one of the reason I always recommend the SGSII over other android handsets - its the only one that has gpu acceleration/caching to make it ultra smooth every where in its UI, not just in the browser.

SKILL said:
You can't exactly compare the two by raw figures, the 225 is architecturally the same as the 220, but with efficiency improvements, as the 220 doesn't come anywhere near the 543MP2 I seriously doubt the 225 is going to change that.

we will have to wait and see when its production ready and inside a device.

ghost101 said:
I did read. The anandtech article says its simply an revision improvement (higher clock speed) on adreno 220 which also has high raw specs.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4940/qualcomm-new-snapdragon-s4-msm8960-krait-architecture/3

So 50% improvement if you believe Qualcomm.

the article to me says Adreno 225 has fixed the issues in 220. And I was comparing at like for like core speeds of the sgx43mp2.

And I agree with everyone that says that there is no point in all this computing power if its not put to use by equally impressive software - battery improvements are showing through though I believe.

Is it harder develop software than hardware?

muon · 11 Oct 2011 at 22:42

kona786 said:
the article to me says Adreno 225 has fixed the issues in 220. And I was comparing at like for like core speeds of the sgx43mp2.

Even with a 50% improvement as Qualcomm hope, its way behind.

This is at 800*480 rather than 720p and its slightly ahead of 4430.