With the announcement of the iPhone 3GS, and subsequent digging by AnandTech, we know that Apple’s claim of it being “over 2X faster” than the 3G is no joke. Apple is clearly entering into the realm of true portable gaming with the 3GS.
However, since it is so much faster, and is seen as competition to the PSP by Sony, how does it compare to the hardest of hardcore mobile gaming devices out there?
Well the iPhone 3GS is fast, but not that fast. According to AnandTech’s report, the 3GS is running a PowerVR SGX, most likely at 200 MHz. at that speed, it can push about 7 million triangles per second, and fill at rate of 250 million pixels per second.
Compare that to the PSP, which pushes 33 million triangles per second, with a fill rate of 664 million pixels per second. (source)
This is comparing the graphics processors themselves, and everything here is ‘paper specs’ but at least we are clear on the fact that while the iPhone is certainly an interesting platform for mobile games, it’s never going to be as desireable as the PSP for hardcore gamers. (I no longer feel stupid for saying that, with all all the events that have occured with the PSP lately).
It is certainly more powerful than the ARM9 powered DS, which does about 120,000 triangles per second (and is limited to 2048 triangles per frame, on both screens), with a fill rate of about 30 Million pixels per second. There are certainly some really great games on the DS, so graphics power isn’t everything.
ive been trying to get ppl to understand that the psp 1000 models dont have crap graphics , its still better than DS and iphone !
This is most likely wrong. The guy in the article about 3gs just assumed it was the least powerful but he updated that saying the 3gs has the SGX535 driver. It probably has the SGX535 which i believe puts it in the ~28 million triangles per second range. Together with the MUCH more powerful processor and the at least 4x amount of ram with the newer ones, it might out pace the psp…
The driver is there, but that doesn’t mean the chip is in there. I guess we’ll have to wait and see, looking at things like battery specs, etc, comparing 3GS-exclusives directly to the PSP, we’ll find out how much power it actually has under the hood :)
Your article is totally wrong. The iPhone 3GS is a lot more powerfull than a PSP. The anandtech-article is old and wrong.
The iPhone 3GS has a PowerVR SGX535:
SGX520 (7 MPolys/s, 250Mpx/s) for the handheld mobile market
SGX530/1 (14 MPolys/s) for the handheld mobile market
SGX535 and SGX540 (28 MPolys/s) for handheld high end mobile, portable, MID, UMPC, consumer, and automotive devices
Compared to the iPhone 3GS, the PSP looks like e really slow device. Also the featureset of the 3gs is a lot better.To speak in “Windows-Words”: The 3gs ist betweein DirectX-9 and 10.
So you’re saying that the 3GS uses the 535, which may or may not be true. In any case, 28 million triangles is certainly lower than 33 million. So at best, it is nearly as fast as a PSP, hardly making it look like “a really slow device”
Again, we’ll have to wait and see what the 3GS-exclusive OpenGL games look like when they come out. I am totally confident that they won’t look as good as PSP games, but I could be wrong. I hope I’m wrong, it would be cool if the iPhone ended up being a good 3D gaming device.
Question: In theory – assuming software changes – if they slapped a Micro-DisplayPort connector into an iPhone 3GS, could it drive a 23″ monitor? Is the graphics chip mighty enough?
The Dreamcast has about the same specs as the iPhone here, if not identical specs. Porting iPhone games to the Dreamcast should be done easily. There is an iPhone game that has made it over to the DC called Irides, a puzzle game simmaler to Tetris.
Frome wikipedia:
“Dreamcast specs: The system’s processor is a 200 MHz SH-4 with an on-die 128-bit vector graphics engine, 360 MIPS and 1.4 GFLOPS (single precision), using the vector graphics engine.
The graphics hardware is a PowerVR2 CLX2 chipset, capable of 7.0 million polygons/second peak performance and trilinear filtering. Graphics hardware effects include gouraud shading, z-buffering, anti-aliasing, per-pixel translucency sorting and bump mapping. The system supports approximately 16.78 million colors (24-bit) color output and displays interlaced or progressive scan video at 640×480 video resolution.
The Dreamcast has 16 MB 64 Bit 100 MHz of main RAM, 8 MB 4×16-bit 100 MHz video RAM and 2 MB 16-bit 66 MHz sound RAM. The hardware supports VQ Texture Compression at either asymptotically 2bpp or even 1bpp”
As for the PSP being more powerful than the iPhone, consider this, the PSP is still not as fast as the Dreamcast is, or the PS2 for that matter, so one can reason that the iPhone IS more powerful than a Handheld developed in 2004, which makes sence that technology hadn’t advanced so much in 04 to squeaze the Dreamcast power into a PSP 5 years ago. As for in 2009, I think it makes more sence now than back then that a company could make the gfx of a last gen console into a portible device now, not that the PSP hasn’t come close to it.
Here are linkis to prove what I have stated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast
The new game Irides can be found here
http://www.hellogravity.com/bs/
http://www.goatstore.com/Products/Sega/Dreamcast/?product=372070
The PSP uses TWO 333 MHz MIPS32 R4000-based CPUs, a GPU with 2 MB onboard VRAM running at 166 MHz, and includes 64 MB main RAM and 4 MB embedded DRAM in total. It beats dreamcast which is as you say “The system’s processor is ONE 200 MHz SH-4 with an on-die 128-bit vector graphics engine, 360 MIPS and 1.4 GFLOPS (single precision), using the VECTOR(outdated) graphics engine.” The dreamcast could only support Texture Compression, which isn’t anything.
PsP can do the following-hardware polygon and NURBS rendering, hardware directional lighting, clipping, environment projection and texture mapping, texture compression and tessellation, fogging, alpha blending, depth and stencil tests, vertex blending for morphing effects, and dithering, all in 16 or 24 bit color.
next time research the other side of your argument
The psp can only render 2-3 million sustained polygons (real world performance) and the fillrate should be less than the 664mp claimed by sony when using texture filtering and AA. 33 million FLAT-shaded polygons is what the psp can push, that means polygons without lighting and color or texturing. The 2g/3g iphone can do up to 1 million sustained polygons (shaded, lit, textured, etc.) with free anti-aliasing and bi-linear filtering. The 3gs with sgx 535 is rouphly capable of 20-30 million sustained polygons. Additionally 3GS’s graphics chip has unified shaders while the PSP has seperate vertex and pixel shaders.
Also worth noting is the fact that the 3GS has 8 times the system memory (256MBs) of the PSP1000 (32MBs) (4 times the PSP2k, 3k and Go, which each have 64MBs) and its processor (833mhz), even though it’s underclocked (to 600mhz), is twice as fast as the PSP’s (333mhz).
It’s wrong to assume to simply assume that the 3GS’ ARM CortexA8 CPU is faster than the PSP’s simply because it has nearly double the clock speed (600Mhz vs. 333Mhz)… Clock speed is not a true indicator for the actual performance, it’s also really dependent on the architecture of the chip. A good example is how a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo blows away a 2.4 or even 3.0Ghz Pentium 4, because the C2D has two cores and a superior architecture (shorter more efficient pipeline etc.)
In the same way, the CortexA8, although an awesome chip for mobile devices, is still a fairly simple single core chip with the main emphasis on power conservation, performance comes second. It’s also a general purpose design for running mobile devices (Smartphones, MIDs etc.) and their apps.
The PSP has two CPUs clocked at 333Mhz, one is the main CPU, the other is the media engine for assisting the main CPU with other tasks, such as video decoding. The fact it’s a parallel design means there is a lot more power available, and the main CPU also has an FPU and Vector unit increasing its raw performance even more. All the hardware in the PSP is there for one main reason, to play games. There are less compromises needed to run a more complicated OS like the iPhone’s and a variety of applications. The PSP is a pure gaming machine. Sure the 3GS has a lot more RAM than the PSP, but a lot of that RAM is needed for the OS and running apps… so when you think about how much RAM is actually available for the game developers it would be a lot less than 256MB. On the PSP, most of the RAM is for the games, there is very little overhead for the OS and interface.
So in conclusion, although the iPhone 3GS is an awesome device and a viable gaming platform that will do well. From a purely gaming/graphics perspective, I doubt it is as powerful as the PSP. But hey, the PSP can’t make calls, run cool apps and browse the web as well as the 3GS. It’s hardware is purely for games.
MMMM all the comments and specs being thrown around here is all fine and dandy but nobody here is saying how there is not one game on the iphone 3gs that comes close to the graphical power of the PSP
“here is saying how there is not one game on the iphone 3gs that comes close to the graphical power of the PSP.”
I think Firemint Real Racing, Doom Resurrection, Sims 3, NFS Shift, and Gangstar stack up to what I’ve seen on the PSP. There are a bunch of others but these came to mind first. And all of those are running on the older OpenGL ES 1.1 and so aren’t even using the 3GS’s advantages over the 3G such as OpenGL ES 2.0 and faster hardware.
does anyone know of a way to play iphone games on the psp …?
you can play many Iphone games on the psp, they are called PSP Minis, you can Buy them on the PSN market for cheap, or if you have a hacked psp you can get them for free, they play just as good on the psp if not better, all in all….all the specs etc etc on the iphone or psp is fine and dandy but there is yet a game on the ipone that I have seen that looks better then the psp…….by the way did any of you guys see the graphics of Assassin Greed on the psp ?? Take a look at the graphics on there and tell me or find a game that looks better then that on the Ipone anybod?