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'Epic Zen Garden' Metal Demo Shown Off at WWDC Now Available for Download

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"Unable to Purchase

"Epic Zen Garden" is not compatible with this iPad."

iPad Air here

EDIT: Looks like it's iOS 8 only. Makes sense now, just remembered it's made with the new Metal engine in iOS 8. Feel like a right idiot now..
 
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I've love to know, just what spec of 'PC' this graphical power is equal to.

Give a PC the same screen resolution.

What CPU and GPU would a PC have to use to match the power?

I know they will be faking a lot, and using tricks, like games on rails etc, but that's not my point.

I would love to know at what stage, in genuine PC gaming terms, iOS devices are at right now, with the iPhone6 and the soon to be iPad Air2

Would it be the CPU doing the maths or the GPU throwing the pixels around that are the weakest links?

Is there anythink you can run on an iOS machine, say with 1920x1080 iPhone6 that we can get some idea?
 
Works great on my 5s 64gb and iPad rMini 128gb on iOS 8GM that I downloaded a few days ago.
 
juanrp said:
At least it wasn't an hour of Infinity Blade this keynote.
:D
Click to expand...

I think the Infinity Blade series as we have come to know it is done, but I'm sure it'll be revamped for the iPhone 6S.

Since the gerational leap between the iPhone 5 and 5S was so huge, there's going to be a period of time when some developers may choose to wait until the iP4S and 5 are obsoleted. Otherwise, they will be dumbing their games down to run on the slowest iPhones. And that's no way to take advatnage of cool features like Metal/A7 chip.
 
It's only compatible with the unreleased retina iPad Air 2 with A8 chip.
/s
 
It states it only is for the 5s or later, but at the same time, says "Optimized for the iPhone5". Either way I couldn't get it to launch on the 5.
Xdf01HN.png


/edit sorry for the tiny pic
 
CIA said:
It states it only is for the 5s or later, but at the same time, says "Optimized for the iPhone5". Either way I couldn't get it to launch on the 5.
Image
Click to expand...

When it says "Optimized for iPhone 5 it means the screen ratio, as in 16:9 up from the shorter ratio on the 4S and below.
 
Jsameds said:
When it says "Optimized for iPhone 5 it means the screen ratio, as in 16:9 up from the shorter ratio on the 4S and below.
Click to expand...

True, and I'm sure it's just boilerplate copy pasta on their part, but simply saying "For the iPhone 5s or later" would have been sufficient.
 
tgi said:
Can anyone explain in one or two lines what Metal is exactly? The first I heard of it was at the iPhone6/6plus keynote.
Click to expand...

In a normal game the GPU is mostly idle while waiting for the CPU to issue commands - using this API (A7 or higher) the CPU is the one that becomes idle which means this allows the developer to issue more draw calls (i.e., have more bad guys, weapons, better AI, add more animation, etc)

We are going to see amazing games coming up using Metal - Iphone 5s and higher unfortunately.
 
Thanks for sharing this info, I try to search this app using the app search option and I can't find it.
 
OT: The screenie in the top of the article reminds me of 'House' map in Black Ops 2 :cool:


On topic: I'm not sure I understand this. Is it an engine demo or a bench tester, of sorts?
 
Jessica Lares said:
It looks great, but at the same time I think it's not very fluid. The water in Koi Pond back in the day was more dynamic.
Click to expand...

Yeah I loved Koi Pond. Too bad those developers abandoned that app back in 2009.

I will be curious to see the performance of Zen Garden on my iPhone 6 Plus when I get it vs how it runs on my iPhone 5s.
 
Piggie said:
I've love to know, just what spec of 'PC' this graphical power is equal to.
Click to expand...

The PowerVR G6430 is shipping in the A7. It has a peak output of about 115 GFLOPS. For comparison, the original Xbox GPU is about 6 GFLOPS, the Xbox 360 GPU is about 240 GFLOPS, and the Xbox One is around 1300 GFLOPS. The A8 was stated to be 50% faster, so we're talking around 170 GFLOPS, which is about 70% the speed of an Xbox 360. This is why they still have to fake a lot to get things running up to par visually. That all being said, I hope they limit 3D games on the iPhone Plus to 720p and crank up other things like the lighting effects, etc. The iPhone has twice the RAM of the Xbox 360, so you might be able squeak out some last gen games that look decent running at 720p. A fast motion game isn't going to look vastly different in your hand at 720p vs. native 1080p. Those differences are more noticeable on a larger TV. What is really interesting is the 6S. Assuming a similar 50% bump in GPU performance, it will slightly surpass last-gen consoles and will likely ship with 2GB of ram (well we also said that about the 6 so who knows). But still, 3D gaming on the iPhone is really going to come into it's own. And with Metal, we might be able to get more performance out of them by comparison to consoles.
 
Bodie CI5 said:
OT: The screenie in the top of the article reminds me of 'House' map in Black Ops 2 :cool:


On topic: I'm not sure I understand this. Is it an engine demo or a bench tester, of sorts?
Click to expand...

Zen Garden is a tech demo that shows off Epic's Unreal Engine 4 as well as Apple's METAL framework, much like Epic's "Epic Citadel" demo (also available in the app store) that showed off Unreal Engine 3.
 
macduke said:
The PowerVR G6430 is shipping in the A7. It has a peak output of about 115 GFLOPS. For comparison, the original Xbox GPU is about 6 GFLOPS, the Xbox 360 GPU is about 240 GFLOPS, and the Xbox One is around 1300 GFLOPS. The A8 was stated to be 50% faster, so we're talking around 170 GFLOPS, which is about 70% the speed of an Xbox 360. This is why they still have to fake a lot to get things running up to par visually. That all being said, I hope they limit 3D games on the iPhone Plus to 720p and crank up other things like the lighting effects, etc. The iPhone has twice the RAM of the Xbox 360, so you might be able squeak out some last gen games that look decent running at 720p. A fast motion game isn't going to look vastly different in your hand at 720p vs. native 1080p. Those differences are more noticeable on a larger TV. What is really interesting is the 6S. Assuming a similar 50% bump in GPU performance, it will slightly surpass last-gen consoles and will likely ship with 2GB of ram (well we also said that about the 6 so who knows). But still, 3D gaming on the iPhone is really going to come into it's own. And with Metal, we might be able to get more performance out of them by comparison to consoles.
Click to expand...

Thanks a lot for all of that.
I appreciate it :)

I hope Apple does beef the iPad up to 2GB, though I suspect they won't, and it can before a dam impressive gaming platform for it's size.

Apple 'Don't Do Gaming' which worries me, but we'll see.

I really hope the devs do make the most of this, and don't hold back and cripple titles so they will run on older hardware.
I don't buy the latest hardware to use software not designed for it
 
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