aren't those games also run on old iphones ? Btw it's difficult to say at this time since there is no appstore for maemo, we can only wait till the appearance of Ovi store for maemo.

For games, the real question is whether the faster GPU of the 3GS makes a difference at the N900 resolution (it probably doesn't on the much less dense iPhone screen), or if it only matters for the TV-out (it would have been nice if N900 could output 720p).

Nice find on the polys of the GPU's, I didn't know that.

From what I remember, Apple is still working with developers on pushing out games that truly use its GPU capabilities, so far there has been only demos.

Of course, pushing to the extreme can also lead to excessive heat, short battery life, etc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVR

I do hope the next NIT device from Nokia has a bigger screen and uses a GPU meant for "high end mobile, portable, MID", rather than the one in the N900 -- "for the handheld mobile market".

Umm.. I have a Ipod touch 2nd Gen. It does not have the PowerVR at all. Which means my N900 should run better. But it does play all the games on that list of his.... and they look great. So the N900 should plow through any of those if they are released.


This is what all those games are playing on..

Samsung S5L8900—MBX Lite + VGP Lite + FPU (VFP11) + ARM1176

* iPhone
* iPhone 3G
* iPod Touch
* iPod Touch 2nd gen
* iPod Nano 4th gen
* iPod Nano 5th gen

If you are questioning about N900 GPU performance ...
These demos: http://www.imgtec.com/powervr/insider/powervr-demos.asp
are able to run > 35fps with 800x480 resolution on N900. You can test it by yourself.

There is no game on iPhone 3GS fully utilized OpenGL ES 2 (only one I know uses OpenGL ES 2). 99.9% of games on iPhone is still using OpenGL ES1.

The questions is whether developers willing to devote their time on development. I didn't see any hardware issue stopping them from doing so.

If we extrapolate the current games at launch, we would have to apply a serious exponential algorithm to extrapolate that the N900 will have many games at all

I appreciate the community is driving development, but has there ever been an OS launch with a device as high profile as this with such a small aftermarket for games or apps? It does seem sparse in the default repositories.

Is the OS that complex to where it takes so long for the apps to be migrated to the safe repositories?

I would love to buy some apps & games, but they have to be there first. Us consumers tend to be that way

Well how about this: to make the device more attractive, Nokia buys the first few hundred copies of selected games to be ported to N900 from the developer, and then sells them to end users from the Ovi store. In that way, developers are guaranteed to get some reward for their effort, and Nokia is guaranteed to be able to offer a larger assortment of quality games. Does any of this make sense?

Numbers aside, I truly think that the lack of tools like Unity3D for the Maemo Platform - I've been pestering them somewhat about this - is gonna be a big problem for some 3D games.

Pertaining OpenGL ES 2.0 (standard) on the iPhone, games like Touch KO and Iron Fist Boxing both use openGL ES 2.0 shaders, but not sure if they're fully optimized though despite Unity3D 2.x supporting it fully.

Hmm. I would love to see more games on Maemo, but I really doubt it until the tools like Unity support the platform.

Porting is a good idea if the phone was to be multi touch as the iphone. Tweek will be needed in order to use the Qwerty and money/time will do so. As long as Nokia agrees to this Porting wont be a problem.