Infinity Blade brings ridiculously gorgeous 3D gaming to the iPhone
Seriously: how?
I mean, granted, as mobile devices go, the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 are pretty powerful units. But this powerful?
[singlepic id=638 w=500 h=333 float=center]
These are desktop-quality graphics! On an iPhone!
It just doesn’t seem possible…but there it is. The geniuses at Epic have figured out how to make the Unreal engine work on a 600 MHz processor and a PowerVR SGX535 graphics chip…which, by the way, is probably better known to most of you as the Intel GMA500 graphics processor. Yeah…try running any game built with the Unreal engine on a laptop boasting one of those.
Anyhow, another developer (Chair Entertainment) has capitalized on this to produce a quite phenomenal-looking game, which goes on sale in a few days.
Of course I’ll be buying it.
I’ll buy… 🙂
I was first thinking this might be prerendered things only but the trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDvPIhCd8N4 shows at some point actual video of how it plays on the iphone… very nice
Android port ? ‘kay plz thx
Chair previously used the Unreal engine to make a pretty darn good Xbox Live title. They are a solid developer of these small games.
Seems like, yes. That said, the XBox is…well…I mean, it’s built to be a powerhouse gaming system, and it is. It has a powerful processor and a wicked graphics subsystem.
An iPhone 3GS has the rough equivalent of a high-end Pentium 3 processor, and the exact equivalent of an Intel GMA500 graphics subsystem.
You’d expect an Unreal Engine 3 game to run well and look nice on an Xbox…but on a mobile phone?
According to Carmack, these iPhones are almost equivalent to last generation consoles.
Well, let’s compare…just a quick and dirty spec-check on the “last-gen” versions of the Playstation, Xbox, and iPhone.
Playstation 2 (2000)
– 64-bit Emotion CPU @ 299 MHz
– 32 MB RDRAM
– 147.5 MHz Graphics Synthesizer w/4MB DRAM (can use system memory to process “offscreen” details), 16 pipelines, 48 GB/s bandwidth
Xbox
– 32-bit Coppermine-based 733 MHz Intel Pentium III derivative
– 64 MB SDRAM
– 233 MHz nVidia NV2A (uses system memory), 4 pipelines, 6.4 GB/s
iPhone 3GS
– Samsung S5PC100 ARM Cortex-A8 @ 600 MHz (not sure on 32/64-bit)
– 256 MB eDRAM
– 200 MHz PowerVR SGX535 GPU (uses system memory), 4 pipelines, 4.2 GB/s bandwidth
So, yeah, there is a rough equivalence there. I suppose what gives the iPhone 3GS a bit of an advantage is the fact that its display is only 480×320, which is quite a bit smaller than even PAL or NTSC television resolution (and much smaller than HD resolution); the PowerVR chip therefore is able to compete against more powerful graphics subsystems on the consoles because it’s driving video at a lower resolution than they likely are.
The iPhone 4’s display is higher-res (960×640), but it also has a faster processor and more memory, so I suppose that works out in its favour.
Addendum: It is worth noting that the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 are substantially more powerful than the PSP (any variant), the Nintendo DS (any variant) or DSi; the Pandora handheld gaming console is roughly equivalent to the iPhone 3GS.
Hmmm. The ARM7 (of which the Cortex-A8 is a variant of) is primarily 32-bit, so there’s a possibility the iPhone is 32-bit too.
I would actually almost expect that it’s a 32-bit device, but I wasn’t able to get a hard confirmation in the limited time I allowed for spec searching.
Ok, got it and played it. It’s a wonderful piece of work but it’s not a good game. No freedom of movement, you are on the rail from one fight to the next and very few of those…
It’s like a movie made out of magnificient special effects but not much of a story…
Haven’t grabbed it yet myself; Monday, I’m thinking.
Reading up on the reviews, I kinda figured it might’ve been more rail-based than anything, though it is a pity that it’s not freeform. Though I suppose that’s probably one of the ways they were able to pare it back so it actually could run on the iPhone.