You, sir, are a real trooper and I was hoping that developers might do exactly that, since there is no way the A5X can handle full fledged 3D titles at native res.
The A5X is pretty powerful and it can handle the retina display - but I stress you need to optimise hard to do it. There is a real difference between doing the full rez and doing the non-retina rez with anti-aliasing... The difference is fuzzy edges. In my mind a sharp picture looks lovely!
I urge you to take a look at Timothy Lottes' blog, and his work on FXAA. In my mind the future of graphics is in realistic softness FXAA 4.0 stills In particular, take a look at the results of FXAA applied on frames that have been rendered at half resolution. The quality/performance ratio for that approach, to me, looks phenomenal. So much so that I'd be willing to claim all other forms of realtime anti-aliasing obsolete. Whether or not a similar approach can be implemented as efficiently on PowerVR graphics hardware, I really don't know. But it would certainly be tempting to render the game world of a high-performance 3D game at quarter resolution, upscale with a similar algorithm, and then render the HUD elements at native resolution on top. Basically that approach may have been viable on the step up from 3GS to iPhone4, but I don't know of any games that would've done it. There's always the problem of angry hordes with pitchforks, eager to burn developers at a stake for cheating them of their retina pixels
Mutant Storm... If you look at the PC videos or the iOS ones and you know a lot about iOS hardware then you will know alpha polygons are very filtrate bound. Mutant Storm is basically overloaded with alpha and it can run at 60fps on a full retina screen on the iPad. This can be achieved because the 3d engine that was in Space Tripper (over 3 years worth of work to find out how to render fast on iOS) has been put into use for Mutant Storm. I can honestly say the hardware is powerful but you need some real heavy duty optimisations. The game is in development now but it will really show what the hardware can do... that I promise you.
That's an interesting read But I also stress retina is possible and at 60fps and it looks fantastic. For me retina works and I will use it. Edit. I'm also using a 32 bit colour buffer, 32 bit textures at hi def and tri-linear texture filtering... I just basically turned on the retina screen and it worked to my surprise. This is no idle boast - I'm just saying the iPad3 can handle the higher rez.
Looking forward to Mutant.Storm when it comes out! Btw, I looked up Space Tripper and looks like quite a game.
It's a shame no one bought Space Tripper... Because it really shows off what iOS hardware can do. It basically runs at 60fps on all target hardware. Hopefully Mutant Storm will not have the same fate
I noticed that even low res games that need 2X to fill the screen look a LOT better than on the iPad 2 and the Tegra Android tablets. Turns out not to be my imagination: http://toucharcade.com/2012/03/20/the-new-ipad-uses-retina-assets-for-non-universal-games/ I am stunned how good the apps and games that need 2X look on the iPad 3. Wow.
Not to mention the device will run hot, have frame issues and take up a lot more storage space. I would prefer 3/4 resolution. Given how great low res apps look when zoomed, seems a fair and logical trade off.
Hiya, we develop apps and are watching this thread closely. One of the things that are important to us are user impressions of having too few or too many options As android is a target, we're making detail sliders for those. How do you feel about detail sliders for iOS in options? Could it be too much for the casual iOS gamer? We have every device out there and target 30fps for all of them, but intend to scale the detail invisibly to the player to maintain 30 fps. Would some players like to try the high detail modes, knowing it might result in a 20fps game that doesn't feel as good?
well no doubt 3d games with lower gfx fidelity.. (for sake of comparsion use infinity blade 2 as the top) will be able to render at retina ipad resolutions.. the same can be said about most of the average games out there.. 2d, 3d, etc. the hardware will possible be enough to render them.. but then thoose games that pushed the old hardware to its limit will be the real benchmark for performance of the hardware (imho) .. that visually simpler games work is in all honesty nothing "special" i'm somehow more concerned about avaiable memory.. since not only your retina game gets bigger and consumes more memory but all the other apps next to you too.. so 1gb can get alow more crowded than the ipad2 especially in sprite heavy 2d games.
I would welcome the inclusion of detail sliders in the top end games as the iOS gaming platform matures. iOS games are almost like PC games in that it's almost an open business environment where games are innovative and unpredictable. Sliders will allow tailoring some high end games to performance tastes. Consoles go thru a more predictable, homogenized development cycle to retail, creating a more sterile product (good and bad).
Quite a few unity developers regularly hit 60fps. 60fps isn't anything special as you know, so long as you avoid fill rate issues, obvious lights and complex shaders. I've found you can go nuts with poly count. I prefer to hit 30 with big detail and big shaders than strip it for 60. Physynth runs fine at 60 on pad2 onwards, but it's locked to 30 since 60 made no difference and may as well save a bit of juice.
