




Dual core Snapdragon also coming in 2011



Qualcomm's Chip Plans for 2011

















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RE: Irrelevant
By DanNeely on 11/19/2010 2:48:10 PM , Rating: 3
This is almost certainly the same snake oil first printed a month or two ago that stressed vertex/polygon performance equal to the PS3. What they're not mentioning is that vertex/polygon performance almost flatlined for several generations because texture/shading performance offered the largest gains. As a result the GeForce 5xxx and GT2xx series cards had almost equal poly performance despite the fact that in each of the 4 major version increments total performance doubled.

Since they're not going into any specifics on overall performance I assume that that shader/texture performance levels are on part with a high end 5xxx card and about 4x slower than the 78xx variant in the PS3.

OTOH when smartphone screens are closer to analog TV resolutions than 720p it might be able to polish the handful of pixels it does push to the same degree as the PS3. This is ofc assuming that they're not scaling the polygon performance level for the screen size when making the comparison in the first place.

RE: Irrelevant
By mcnabney on 11/19/2010 4:11:42 PM , Rating: 2
I could see this working out, but the original poster was correct that I/O needs to be drastically changed.

My solution is three devices.

1. Smartphone with high performance 1080p gaming power
2. Wireless controller(s) with all the same features as found in current consoles.
3. Wireless Headset that create a 1080p image for the wearer. Could even be 3D.

It could even do DLNA to current 1080p HDTVs when at home. Wireless HDMI or WiGig could certainly do the job and LTE connections on the smartphones allow sub-30ms latency. Game on!

RE: Irrelevant
By ekv on 11/20/2010 4:15:29 AM , Rating: 2
RE: Irrelevant
Me likey!

RE: Irrelevant
By superPC on 11/20/2010 5:53:45 AM , Rating: 2
polygon performance hasn't increase? from GTX 285 to GTX 480 polygon performance has increase by more than two fold ( see here ).

RE: Irrelevant
By DanNeely on 11/20/2010 2:55:20 PM , Rating: 3
You need to work on your reading comprehension. What I said was that it was almost flatlined from the GF5xxx to the GF2xx series. Since I don't have ready access to the detailed performance breakdown at each level I picked that range because it was what was used to point out how the current generation's gains were a major departure from how things had been done in the past. Since the 78xx based GPU in the PS3 was in the middle of the range it was a valid comparison; while what happened between the 285 and the 480 is not.

The 280 was 150x faster on shading, but only 3x faster on geometry (texturing hardware got a big boost too but I don't have an actual numbers). Scaling with ATI was similar although prior to the 4xx series they had a decent (if virtually never used) edge over nVidia on geometry.

What finally happened was DX11's tessellation giving a big boost to geometry needs in the common API. This in turn was due to the shader and texturing performance levels of the cards getting high enough that the most readily apparent difference between what they could render in real time on a single card, and what took an hour a frame for one of Pixar renderfarm was that the latter had a much higher polygon count, not that it had higher AA levels/etc.

We probably aren't going to see shader performance flatline for several generations the way geometry did though because the more detailed meshes require more computing power to shade properly. I'm not certain if higher polygon counts will push texturing equally hard or not.

RE: Irrelevant
By DanNeely on 11/20/2010 2:59:24 PM , Rating: 2
Actually if anything I understated how big the real world performance gap is likely to be because I didn't have time to find the anandtech article and had underestimated how rapidly shaders had been improving during the period when geometry performance enhancements were sidelined. As the first round of mobile GPUs with geometry performance that's close their performance levels for everything else are almost certainly at the low end of the range. The only counterbalancing factor is that high DPI screens need less AA because the smaller pixels are less visible to the human eye.

