Apple have just now unveiled metal an Api which provides direct acess to gpu and cpu for A7(not yet confirmed for older chips),How do you guys think it will affect ios gaming and can we be finally be looking at console quality graphics? Any devs. out there if they would like to chime in please do,I would love to know their thoughts about it. Thread is also open to all topics related to graphics on ios devices,Feel free to post your thoughts. IPHONE 5 VS PS3 BENCHMARKED(CPU AND RAM PERFORMANCE) Found this to be quite interesting,It's a geekbench benchmark verfied and correct which compares Cpu and Ram Performance of Iphone 5 and a ps3 and guess what our humble iph5 beats ps3 in almost all of the tests: http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/compare/5144/1030202 Geekbench 2: Iphone 5 score:1601 Ps3 score:989 Ps3 vs Iphone 5s Gpu Ps3 uses a gimped(lesser) version of an 7900gtx,Anandtech here compares desktop gpu to current mobile gpu and the results are quite revealing: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6877/the-great-equalizer-part-3/3 Trex hd(offscreen test) which is the most taxing and important test as far as real world gaming performance is concerned is quite revealing: Nvidia geforce 7900gtx(equivalent to ps3 gpu): 24fps Iphone 5s(A7 64 bit):25fps Note: Ps3's gpu should score a little less than that of 7900gtx since it's a downgraded version of it.Clearly 5s is slightly more powerful than ps3 in gpu power. Cpu and ram performance of ps3 and 5s could not be compared directly since the 64bit A7 doesn't support geekbench 2,But considering how 5s is almost 2 times that of iphone 5 when it comes to CpU it's safe to assume that it's quite a lot more powerful than a ps3 in that regard.
Its exciting to see whats capable. There was a funny post recently where the user remembered a demo built using Unity (you kinda walk through a village) which was impressive as anything. 2 years later another Unity demo was basically a flappy bird clone ?!? How far we've come ! But yeah its exciting to see even better graphics in games. However i'm an older gamer so i'm not too bothered by graphics, to me its all about gameplay. I've played quite a few games which look stunning but the gameplay is so boring and i lose interest. My other worry is filesize, just wish Apple would bring out devices with larger memory, in the early days most games were under 200 meg, now theres so many 1.4 gig and more. Exciting times though, still a shame Apple hardly mention controllers though
@psj3809 It just might be the best apple conference since unveiling of original iphone certainly a step in right direction.What was exciting to see was that they had all major engines Ue4,Unity cryengine and frostbite at one place,which is a first I would say.Exciting times indeed! I can certainly see them showcasing atleast 1 graphically rich game on the release of iphone 6 from either epic or crytek. It could also mean that the next Apple Tv most likely having A8 chip might be more gaming focused than ever.
I don't think metal would change a lot. It's not how iOS works and right now ram can't handle rendering without metal at some cases. I'm not sure with the extra rendering power there would be much of a change. Unless developers choose to give it a little bit room at ram which means they would've to cut graphics quality in another way. Maybe less detailed textures or something like that. Although I'm no expert this are all assumptions.
This test compares CPU and Ram when it comes to graphics there isn't a competition between this two devices. Also iPhone has to run a heavy operating system with these resources, while ps3 uses almost all resources on games. There is that too.
I don't think graphics will improve by a huge margin, maybe not at all. I just think the API will help render games faster than the OpenGL technique. Overall performance and gameplay will improve with graphic intensive apps.
The gpu in 5s though is almost on par with ps3,The good thing about that test is that we should be getting console quality textures and physics even on an iphone 5.With metal and dedicated game engines like frostbite you can pump up those numbers even higher but it will depend on whether the devs. will have big budget for their games or not.
You're right it's all up to the devs. We can wait and see what happens. Maybe EA and other big companies will do something as well.
It will widen the gap between native iOS games and games designed to be cross-platform, which I think was Apple's goal. Right now, the performance hit to go multiplatform isn't too bad, relative to the amount of users a developer will gain. Metal might be enough to push top-tier developers back to iOS-only development.
I agree,it will make life difficult for devs who want to relrase their game on windows and android along eith ios.But ios users willd definitely see a huge improvement in performance and graphics over android users having phones of similar power or even slighly more raw power.The difference in gaming performance on a 5s and on an s5 will will significantly increase,unless devs intentionally gimp their games to make sure they run smoothly on android too.
That's true - Apple has traditionally maintained a fairly strong performance gap, even in instances when Android OEMs might have technically superior graphics hardware. That has a lot to do with Apple's better-designed drivers. Even among games not specifically iOS native, Metal will make a difference. It was designed in cooperation with the Unity and Unreal Engine teams, who will presumably optimize their engines to take advantage of it. That should make the performance gap between iOS and Android versions of the same apps even wider. Some developers will gimp the iOS versions, but the ones who do will find themselves at a disadvantage against developers who instead maximize iOS performance. All of this is exactly what Apple has in mind. They're still the number 1 target platform by a wide margin - I think they're trying to increase that distance even further.
It's just more bloat to drive up development costs and file size's; can't say that I'm ecxcited... maybe if Apple final started to allow reasonable, read "non-proprietary", memory expansions.
