ARM bringing Xbox-like graphics to your cellphone!
By Will Park on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 2:36 PM PST In Gaming, Technologies
Gamers rejoice! Your cellphone may soon pack enough graphics-processing power to play Xbox-like games wherever you please. According to chip-designer ARM’s graphics product manager Remi Pederson, the new high-end Mali-200 and Mali-400 graphics processors (GPUs) from ARM may be ready to bring truly high-powered gaming to handsets as early as Winter 2009. The new graphics chips are capable of throwing out enough polygons to match the original Xbox.
The Mali-200 GPU boasts OpenGL ES 2.0 support and is capable of rendering 16 million triangles per second and 275 million pixels per second. And, the Mali-200 chip is powerful enough to run Flash and Java games. The Mali-400 is basically the same as the Mali-200, but has multi-core aspirations. A single 100Mhz Mali-400 core can be scaled to quad-core applications that clock in at 300Mhz. The Mali-400 is even capable of displaying true 1080p high-definition resolutions.
To show off the new graphics crunching capabilities of the Mali graphics core, ARM will be demonstrating a fully-ported version of the Xbox racing-game Project Gotham Racing on a mobile phone during the Game Developers’ Conference in San Francisco. “Performance-wise, it runs like the original Xbox, but feature-wise it looks like an Xbox 360 title,” says Pederson.
Xbox-like games in true HD on our smartphones? Imagine that.
[Via: PCWorld]
I talked to the N-Gage guys about their opinion of 3d chips in cellphones. They said, it’s great if you want to recharge your device every hour.
Still, battery life aside, better graphics on devices are welcome. I’m wondering how many more rounds of gaming consoles we’ll see, with many “phones” able to output to TVs, and having more sensors than most consoles. I’d rather buy games for my iPhone than my Wii, because it’s always with me. No if we could only connect to a TV with wireless…