Mobile Graphics > 360/PS3 in 2014

[Blackhearted]

you guys are missing the point... they are going to have hardware faster then a ps3 in a tiny tiny little box. that's pretty crazy....

If they were topping the ps3's power in a size as small as a phone say.... 2 or 3 years after the ps3s launch, you may have a point. But topping 9 year old hardware in a small form factor... not that amazing.

[rajputwarrior]

I agree. I just hate that they've jumped into the gaming hardware bandwagon rather than pushing a more obvious form of optimization. My old phones would last days before needing a charge. New phones last around 10-16 hours. That's a huge step backward in terms of their actual purpose. There is so much technology available these days, phones with similar power to what they had 4 years ago could be streamlined to generate less heat and use less power.

and that's the problem i am seeing with a lot of phones manufacturers out there, especially the android manufactures. they push things like 4G/LTE modems out the door but completely ignore how bad batter life is when those modems in the phone. then they keep coming out with phones with power hungry dual cores and brag "WE ARE FASTER THEN THE IPHONE!!! HANDS DOWN!!!" but the battery will last half a day if you are lucky. I am willing to drop a few megahurtz if that means i will get a phone with a better battery life no problem...

[rajputwarrior]

If they were topping the ps3's power in a size as small as a phone say.... 2 or 3 years after the ps3s launch, you may have a point. But topping 9 year old hardware in a small form factor... not that amazing.

but you gotta think when smart phones came into the game and starting pushing it's hardware. that maybe start about 4-5 years ago where the push began.

[Slammers]

Hmm I honestly think they my mean next gen consoles.Think about how fast mobile technology is progressing. We already have quad core cpu's with dual core gpu's etc.

I mean, obviously, the actual specs of phones and tablets have already suprpassed the ps3 and 360. The gfx in games are not better yet due to mobile game dev time and funding etc. but in actual hardware power tablets are already ahead.

So if in the next year 720/ps4 come out boasting hardware that is somewhere around a mid->migh end computer at this current time, it doesn't seem that crazy that in two - three years mobile gfx will have surpased them. Certainly in 4-5 years I think phones and tablets will be destroying the ps4/720.

[Anthony Tosie Veteran]

PC's can be built with that as a primary function. Phones and other mobile platforms cannot (at least not yet). A computer does what you make it to do. A phone/tablet is what it is and the fact that the manufacturers are blurring their purpose means that they are going to become riddled with features and stuff they don't need, driving up their price and preventing the consumer from seeing productive improvements and price drops as quickly as we should.

I'm not saying that they haven't improved anything, they certainly have. But today's smart phones could be a lot simpler and have a much, much longer battery life than they currently do if the focus was to minimize power consumption in the hardware/software rather than to beef up the power.

Gaming apps are the overwhelmingly most-purchased apps on tablets and phones (and when I say "overwhelmingly", I mean it's literally not even remotely close). It's safe to say that people do want to game on these devices. And, as you point out, you can't upgrade phones. So why not give them the capabilities from the get-go? You can always purchase a different phone. Nvidia's Tegra platform isn't even in that many phones, and that's the company saying mobile graphics will match consoles in 2014.

If you feel your battery life is significantly shorter than it should be, there's always feature phones. But even still, graphics aren't impacting battery life as much as you probably think. That's primarily from operating on 3G/4G or over WiFi that zaps a phone's battery life. Unless you're gaming, you're probably not going to see any substantial impact from your phone's graphics.

[Emn1ty]

Gaming apps are the overwhelmingly most-purchased apps on tablets and phones (and when I say "overwhelmingly", I mean it's literally not even remotely close). It's safe to say that people do want to game on these devices. And, as you point out, you can't upgrade phones. So why not give them the capabilities from the get-go? You can always purchase a different phone. Nvidia's Tegra platform isn't even in that many phones, and that's the company saying mobile graphics will match consoles in 2014.

If you feel your battery life is significantly shorter than it should be, there's always feature phones. But even still, graphics aren't impacting battery life as much as you probably think. That's primarily from operating on 3G/4G or over WiFi that zaps a phone's battery life. Unless you're gaming, you're probably not going to see any substantial impact from your phone's graphics.

My point is, even with a phone that lasts in optimum conditions maybe 2-2.5 days all the time spent on optimizing and upgrading hardware to play games could be spent on optimizing the device as a mobile platform. I'm sure by now with less power and more refined energy usage we could have phones that last a week on a charge.

The mobile market is indeed heavily saturated with the purchase of games, but these games are 90% of the time short one-offs that are only bought because they are extremely cheap. I don't see how running a game as detailed as Killzone 3 will net you a purchase if the price tag is $30 on the mobile marketplace due to the development time required to make it. A $20-$30 drop in a sea of $.99 and $1.99 games is going to get you nothing.

And even if the power is made to make their platforms run faster, why not optimize on a standard architecture rather than upgrading them to output more? I at least think these are valid questions.