Is 2 x graphics perf enough with 4 x pixels?

[Jo Tan]

[Apologies if already posted, my search found nothing]

Based on Apple's relative comparisons with NVIDIA's Tegra 3, the new iPad has twice the graphics performance of the iPad2. But, of course, it has four times the number of pixels!

What are people's thoughts on whether doubling performance is sufficient to maintain overall graphics performance?! (As you can tell I'm not a graphics or benchmark expert ...)

 

[screensaver400]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

I'm not an expert either, but I'd guess that there isn't a 1:1 correlation between pixels and the level of performance required.

 

[kamonohashi]

[Apologies if already posted, my search found nothing]
What are people's thoughts on whether doubling performance is sufficient to maintain overall graphics performance?!

I'm no expert either, but here's my understanding :

- In 2D, it should be enough.
- For heavy 3D games, on the other hand, the power required to render graphics grows exponentially with the number of pixels. So no, 2x the power for 4x the pixels probably won't cut it.
I guess developers will keep using 1024 x 768 as a common resolution for 3D games, and use the extra power to enhance overall visual quality by adding effects and stuff.
After all, isn't the whole point of using a 2048 x 1516 screen the ability to display crisp 1024 x 768 images, without the blurring that would occur with any intermediate resolution ?

 

[Anlino]

Not 1:1, but a pretty high one. It'll definitely be interesting how games like Infinity Blade 2 performs on the iPad 3. Assuming they update it, which I hope they do.

 

[iHuman1337]

The problem with what the OP is saying is that he assumes that rendering the pixels on the iPad 2 uses the maximum capacity for the GPU, which isn't even remotely the case. It will be the same case for the new iPad.