Imagination Technologies Releases Details on Next-Generation GPU for iOS Devices

[the8thark]

Mario is. Metroid was (when Retro Studios was at the helm). Zelda is... well it's the same game it's been for 10 years.

As for production quality, well Nintendo's got some catching up to do when it comes to iPhone games. Nintendo's portable (and non portable!) hardware can't compete with Apple's aggressive hardware releases, and the software juggernaut combo of the app store/android market will own portable gaming soon enough.

By the time the Wii U comes out, Nintendo will finally be capable of doing graphics on par with iPhone games that have been out for some time. And by then, Apple's next killer product(s) will continue to drain gamers' time.

You miss the point entirely.
The good gamecube and Wii games were good not cause of HD. The games were not HD. They just made the best game they could on the hardware they hat at the time. And the games were very fun and looked pretty good too. There's a reason why the Wii and Wii games outsold the PS3/Xbox 360. It's not for the best tech specs. It's cause the games were fun to play. And everyone from 3 year old kid to grandma had something that could interest them.

That's exactly what iOS gaming is. It's also not about tech specs there too. It's about mostly little casual games that are so fun. So fun you can't put them down. Though the games look good, the graphics is not why Nintendo or iOS developers sell a lot of games. It's the fun factor.

 

[damir00]

IMO you nailed it. iOS is still waiting on that truly immersive gaming release. I liked Angry Bords as much as anyone else, but Zelda or COD or etc it ain't. My kids have access to pretty much anything and everything, and iOS gaming is at the bottom of their gaming mindshare, below even Flash-based gaming.

I really don't think that can change until we're playing iOS games on something TV sized, which means Apple will have to support proper gaming controllers.

Here's hoping!

 

[chrmjenkins]

I dont know ..... I highly doubt that this will end up in the A6 processor ... as Apple has finished the design a while ago and test run to manufacture the SoC (A6) has been reported to have begun since this fall ...

Wouldn't having this GPU in the A6 .. be cutting it kind of short in the design phase for Apple ?

Announced publicly last June. Apple may have had it to play with even before then in the Apple labs. I don't know what kind of lead time Apple needs but they have used Intel CPUs that hadn't been publicly available in some products, so they push the envelope of new technology often.

Not a good comparison point. They don't design the CPU, they just drop it in on their logic board design. All OEMs and ODMs have their motherboards ready for CPU launches. With this GPU, they have to put design effort in to get it in the design.

PowerVR does not design or build discrete chips. Like ARM they create chip module designs (IP cores). Companies like Apple, TI, Samsung etc have to select the modules (CPU core, GPU, other stuff) and design + build the actual chip. This will take at least a year, more likely two years.

ARM Cortex15 design has been out for over a year now, and there still aren't any chips available with it!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A15_MPCore#Implementations

That's not conveying the whole picture. ImgTec has to prove their design in silicon before they start licensing it. They've not going to license a design just because it simulates fine and meets all the design rules of their preferred foundry.

You actually do. With the iPhone 4/iPod touch 4G display, aliasing artifacts are very clearly visible if you don't use anti-aliasing. Without anti-asliasing, it just doesn't look as good.

--Eric

Isn't that a product of how the polygon count and geometry itself? If you are running complex geometry on a retina display, AA shouldn't be necessary.

 

[grahamnp]

PowerVR SGX 543MP2 GPU (used in iPad 2) power: ~19 GFLOPS at 1x power consumption
PowerVR G6200 and G6400 GPU power: 100+ GFLOPS at 1/5x power consumption (or 5x performance at 1/5x power consumption);
...................................................... or
...................................................... 500+ GFLOPS at 1x power consumption (25x performance at 1x power consumption)
That's at least 25x of power over last gen chips.

Don't forget that these GPUs are available multi-core configurations and they don't make these specifics known so I'm assuming that they are picking their strongest possible showing here. I noticed that Qualcomm picked a top of the line configuration in the marketing material for their next-gen Adreno GPUs when most SoCs only end up with the single-core config.

 

[mdriftmeyer]

PowerVR does not design or build discrete chips. Like ARM they create chip module designs (IP cores). Companies like Apple, TI, Samsung etc have to select the modules (CPU core, GPU, other stuff) and design + build the actual chip. This will take at least a year, more likely two years.

ARM Cortex15 design has been out for over a year now, and there still aren't any chips available with it!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A15_MPCore#Implementations

ARM and ImgTec do more than just provide designs. They stamp out their own SoC and certify them with Fabs.

http://www.arm.com/about/globalfoun...n-based-on-arm-cortex-a-series-processors.php

The same goes for ImgTec's PowerVR platform.

They license their platforms for 3rd parties to modify them to their own designs.

OT: IBM and Global Foundries Fab 8 in Upstate NY start rolling:

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/01/10/globalfoundries-starts-production-fab-8/1

 

[MRU]

I doubt we will see this in the iPad 3, more likely the SGX543MP4 (the same quad core gpu as in the PS Vita).

But if we do see this in iPhone 5 and a next gen iPad, it's seriously gonna give Sony a lot to contend with if mobiles are now more powerful than it's latest handheld.

Uncharted graphics on your iPad. Yes please

 

[GFLPraxis]

Mario is. Metroid was (when Retro Studios was at the helm). Zelda is... well it's the same game it's been for 10 years.

Twilight Princess was a bit of a rehash, but Ocarina of Time > Wind Waker > Skyward Sword is the same game? Because those four games are the only flagship console titles over the last ten years.

As for production quality, well Nintendo's got some catching up to do when it comes to iPhone games. Nintendo's portable (and non portable!) hardware can't compete with Apple's aggressive hardware releases, and the software juggernaut combo of the app store/android market will own portable gaming soon enough.

Hardware sure, but software-wise, I'm sorry, I'm totally unimpressed with the app store's offerings.

By the time the Wii U comes out, Nintendo will finally be capable of doing graphics on par with iPhone games that have been out for some time. And by then, Apple's next killer product(s) will continue to drain gamers' time.
Image

OK, so you throw in a screenshot of Infinity Blade (which I've fully played through many times, btw). Infinity Blade is what I consider to be the best iOS title at the moment, and even it feels somewhat shallow and repetitive. Great engine, but limited depth; there's little in terms of puzzles and exploration, and it's essentially just a good combat engine paired with grinding.

You're focusing too much on hardware. The AAA iOS games fall completely short in terms of game design and depth compared to the AAA Nintendo games, or AAA games on other major platforms.

Your description works well to describe the Wii library. Most of it is shovel-ware waggle crap, with Nintendo being the exception (most of the time).

I don't disagree here...it's mostly Nintendo's software that makes the Wii. But we're talking about handheld gaming here.

Disclaimer: I travelled across the country playing Super Smash Bros competitively in tournaments at a national level and despise 'grinding' games like most MMOs and many casual games...iOS does not have anything remotely competitive like Starcraft, Smash Bros, Street Fighter, or heck even Mario Kart DS (note: Mario Kart DS is competitive, Mario Kart Wii is not).

 

[chrmjenkins]

ARM and ImgTec do more than just provide designs. They stamp out their own SoC and certify them with Fabs.

http://www.arm.com/about/globalfoun...n-based-on-arm-cortex-a-series-processors.php

The same goes for ImgTec's PowerVR platform.

They license their platforms for 3rd parties to modify them to their own designs.

OT: IBM and Global Foundries Fab 8 in Upstate NY start rolling:

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/01/10/globalfoundries-starts-production-fab-8/1

Don't know why you got downvoted for saying the same thing I did. A company that licenses silicon IP that they don't verify with the fab is a company that doesn't stay in business.

 

[crazysword]

It's not really a stupid question. The current chip, the PowerVR SGX543MP2 was a huge step up from the previous generation (about 4x faster), putting every other mobile offering on the market to shame (the competition may have since caught up, I'm not sure). It's a chip capable of 19.2GFLOPs, which is on par with a Core 2 Duo (the Core 2, of course, being more flexible). It's also as fast as the Geforce 6800, NVidia's flagship GPU from 2004. Perhaps surprisingly, it's the PowerVR chip in this case that is more flexible.

A 20x increase (the figure quoted in the article) over that at the same energy consumption doesn't sound reasonable, but let's suppose that happened. You'd arrive at 384 GFLOPs. That brings you up to the level of a flagship desktop GPU from 2007 (Geforce 8800) and (humorously) beyond Intel's current integrated offerings.

I think you are being way too optimistic here..

" push 350 million polygons per second, compared to the nearly 70 million polygons per second achievable with the dual-core SGX543MP2 currently used by Apple."

More like 5x

----------

No way! Intel showed the prowess of their Ivy Bridge chip playing a Direct-X 11 game at CES today (see here). It was awesome -- they did not want the game to go by too fast so they decided that instead of playing a live game on the Ivy Bridge (which would have been too fast and too much for the audience to handle) that they would instead make a video of somebody playing the game and then play it back on VNC instead.

Their Ivy Bridge chips must have awesome graphics!


PS: Intel graphics suck. So glad they patent-blocked the competition from delivering better graphics to us.

FYI, anandtech confirmed that Ivy bridge is indeed capable of running the game.

----------

I doubt we will see this in the iPad 3, more likely the SGX543MP4 (the same quad core gpu as in the PS Vita).

But if we do see this in iPhone 5 and a next gen iPad, it's seriously gonna give Sony a lot to contend with if mobiles are now more powerful than it's latest handheld.

Uncharted graphics on your iPad. Yes please

until people are willing to pay more for their games, dont expect much. Just because the hardware is there doesnt mean developers will be willing to spend that much money to make the game.

I believe God of War 3 cost most than 30M to make, which is more than the revenue the inifnity blade franchie generated.

 

[thenerdal]

until people are willing to pay more for their games, dont expect much. Just because the hardware is there doesnt mean developers will be willing to spend that much money to make the game.

I believe God of War 3 cost most than 30M to make, which is more than the revenue the inifnity blade franchie generated.

God of War 3 Sold 4 Million Copies. Now, if we multiply that by how much it costs, then that's more than $120 Million dollars that God of War 3 made. That's way more than the $30 million Infinity Blade made. Even though that's the first and the second one combined. Not one game like God of War III

 

[chrmjenkins]

Game quality is an asymptotic curve (diminishing returns). The visual difference between a 1M game and a 5M game isn't going to be that big due to the prevalence of middleware like the unreal engine used in infinity blade.

 

[holmesf]

I think you are being way too optimistic here..

More like 5x

I never said I actually expected a 20x improvement. Quite the opposite in fact. Also note that geometry throughput is entirely separate from shading performance. Games are more likely to be shader limited.

 

[Eric5h5]

Isn't that a product of how the polygon count and geometry itself? If you are running complex geometry on a retina display, AA shouldn't be necessary.

No, it's a product of 300dpi not being enough to make the pixels "invisible". You'd need at least 600dpi for that. Hard edges are clearly jagged at normal viewing distances for an iPhone screen, unless they are anti-aliased. If you take a screenshot of any screen and import it into an image-viewing app and enlarge it, you can see that all text, graphics, everything is anti-aliased. That's the only reason things look smooth. They wouldn't bother if it wasn't still necessary.

--Eric

 

[crazysword]

God of War 3 Sold 4 Million Copies. Now, if we multiply that by how much it costs, then that's more than $120 Million dollars that God of War 3 made. That's way more than the $30 million Infinity Blade made. Even though that's the first and the second one combined. Not one game like God of War III

what's with the

I think you misunderstood me. I am just pointing out that people shouldn't expencted GOTY quality games (uncharted, gow 3) etc on the ios platform even if the hardware is powerful enough to run it.

Developers will not be willing to spend the big bucks because even the most successful game (other than angry birds) the infinity blade franchie, only generated 30m.

 

[mkrishnan]

Developers will not be willing to spend the big bucks because even the most successful game (other than angry birds) the infinity blade franchie, only generated 30m.

The potential for really high dollar investment iOS games is probably either in games where a large amount of the code / content can be ported from a console OS or a Mac/PC game, or else maybe a game that generates large revenue across Android and iOS put together. Either way, the iOS-specific development costs are not so large, even if the overall costs are high.

OTOH, the revenue Infinity Blade made ... wouldn't that have been close to unthinkable in the mobile phone market a few years ago? The size of the iOS/Android market and the scale of the games that come out on it, even if years behind PC or Playstation, is rapidly expanding. If Infinity Blade can make $30M across two editions on iOS in the last year, it's not inconceivable that this number morphs into $60 or 90M in a few years, and that's probably enough revenue to justify a much more expensive development process.

 

[crazysword]

Game quality is an asymptotic curve (diminishing returns). The visual difference between a 1M game and a 5M game isn't going to be that big due to the prevalence of middleware like the unreal engine used in infinity blade.

A decent console quality game cost much more than 1m to make.

However, let's suppose a developer indeed spends 1m on a console quality game.

If they sell the game for 2.99, they need to sell 476191 copies of the game just to break even...

In comparison, a console or PC game sellings for usually 60 bucks retail and probably 20-30 bucks go to the developers.

----------

The potential for really high dollar investment iOS games is probably either in games where a large amount of the code / content can be ported from a console OS or a Mac/PC game, or else maybe a game that generates large revenue across Android and iOS put together. Either way, the iOS-specific development costs are not so large, even if the overall costs are high.

OTOH, the revenue Infinity Blade made ... wouldn't that have been close to unthinkable in the mobile phone market a few years ago? The size of the iOS/Android market and the scale of the games that come out on it, even if years behind PC or Playstation, is rapidly expanding. If Infinity Blade can make $30M across two editions on iOS in the last year, it's not inconceivable that this number morphs into $60 or 90M in a few years, and that's probably enough revenue to justify a much more expensive development process.

Yup just like GTA 3. Once there hardware is there they will probably just port some games on to the platform making it significantly less expensive to make. (P.S There are some games which just not meant for touch controls and GTA3 played like ass compared to playing it on the PS3 or the PC)

I would argue that Infinity blade is an outlier rather than the norm. After all, isn't the most successful game other than Angry Birds and other crappy social freemium games?

I definitively can see a mobile game that can generate 90m one day, but that game/franchise will most likely be the most popular game on that platform.

If you are a developer would you be willing to take that risk?

----------

I never said I actually expected a 20x improvement. Quite the opposite in fact. Also note that geometry throughput is entirely separate from shading performance. Games are more likely to be shader limited.

Suppose this chip is included as part of IPAD 4. What do you think increase in performance will be compared to the current MP2 chip? I don't have a EE background

One reason I don't plan to get the IPAD3 is that if they really put a retina display in it, the sgxmp4 is going to be under powered when it needs to draw 4x the pixels as the ipad2.

 

[mkrishnan]

I would argue that Infinity blade is an outlier rather than the norm. After all, isn't the most successful game other than Angry Birds and other crappy social freemium games?

I definitively can see a mobile game that can generate 90m one day, but that game/franchise will most likely be the most popular game on that platform.

This is a good point. Right now, the estimates are that the top grossing iOS games get around $2-3M/mo and the top grossing Android game chips in about $1M more, so in the best case scenario, if a game topped both devices simultaneously, right now it's a $4M/mo market on a good day. The stats are for select top-grossing games, so they don't give an idea (which I haven't found) of what average monthly revenues are for top-10 games.

This survey: http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/2011/09/28/results-ios-game-revenue-survey/

Suggests that around 4% of developers (from a sample of 252) make >$1M as developer lifetime revenues, but 4% of a developer pool as large as the iOS developer pool would still be a lot of people, so those odds look a little bit better.

Who knows. I can conceive of the iOS market being able to pull of games at least as big as the big DS sellers, in time, and that's not a bad scale, but probably over time a lot of it will be some kind of tie-in where more or less of the content is shared development costs with other platforms (hopefully, as you point out, not just resulting in ports that don't work as well with touch controls, but also in some games where content is re-used but the game also is changed to suit iOS).

I think you're right in the sense that the day that iOS (or MacOS) can generate a platform exclusive title with a $30M development budget are a ways off, if that would ever happen.

 

[crazysword]

thanks for the link

The "problem" I see for developer is that even quality games cannot be sold for a relatively high price. For a lot of people, a game that costs more than 6.99 is a major turn off. Yet, a game of similar quality on the 3DS and Vita might be listed for $30...


It really is a social psychology thing. People are used to something cheap, so they become very price sensitive. I come from a business background have many books on this subject.. e.g. If the price of milk goes up by a dollar, alot of people will be frustrated even though the total increase in cost is 4 dollars a month. (4 cartons of milk)

Yet they might spend 4 more dollars on a cup of coffee and not even think about it.

 

[damir00]

Developers will not be willing to spend the big bucks because even the most successful game (other than angry birds) the infinity blade franchie, only generated 30m.

The texture packs alone for AAA console titles measure in the gigabytes. That's going to be a problem on a 16GB iPad (or etc).

There is more to sort out here than just GPU speed...

To the other poster - IMO price sensitivity has little to do with it. There is tons of overlap between iPhone/iPad/DS/PS3/XBox ownership. We all know what it's like to pay $1.99 for a game and what it's like to pay $59.99 for a game. The iOS problem is that even the $1.99 games are often over-priced for what they actually deliver.

I'm confident Apple can crack this nut - if they want to. Will be interesting to see if all the aTV buzz signals that they're ready to do so.

 

[chrmjenkins]

A decent console quality game cost much more than 1m to make.

However, let's suppose a developer indeed spends 1m on a console quality game.

If they sell the game for 2.99, they need to sell 476191 copies of the game just to break even...

In comparison, a console or PC game sellings for usually 60 bucks retail and probably 20-30 bucks go to the developers.

Example numbers. The scale is important, not the actual numbers.