Next Gen Console Specs- It Begins

[James]

I hate Infiniti Blade II, but it's kind of a marvel on the new iPad. Looks like a 360 game, but renders out at 2048x1536 without a hiccup.

Am I the only one who would like to see details on how they do that? Memory bandwidth alone should be a massively limiting factor. Then there is the simple fill rate required to put up 30fps (or 60fps) of 2048x1536 pixels on the screen. There has to be a lot trickery going on. It's not a bad thing, I just think that it should be widely known what they are doing.

*Edit: They amazingly have approx 12.8GB/s of theoretical bandwidth to play with. However the memory controller is apparently limited to around 2GB/s. The games and other "intensive" content are never rendered at native resolution. Instead they render at a half-step between 1024x768 and 2048x1536, and then are simply stretched to fit. I have a feeling that if a 3D game tried to render on that system at native res, the tablet would melt.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5688/a...-2012-review/3

Infinity Blade 2 for the new iPad Renders at roughly 1.4x the iPad 2's resolution, then upscales to fill the screen

*Edit2: Depending on how they count 1.4x resolution, I.e. pixel count or dimensions, this is either impressive or truly sad.

Res.	Pixels	Horz	Vert	Base	Notes
  1x	 786432	1024	768	256
1.4x	1101708	1212	909	303	(1.4x pixel count)
  2x	1541120	1433	1075	358.4	(1.4x resolution)
  4x	3145738	2048	1536	512

*Edit3: If a home console tried to pull partial resolution rendering, it would be lambasted by the media and the consumers alike. You can get away with a lot of half measures in order to get "equivalent" performance on a mobile platform. But that sort of thing doesn't fly when you don't have the excuse of extreme power and heat limitations.