Here's a trailer for actual NGP titles. Mind-numbing.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2...technology.ars

Graphically, these games are beautiful and touch adds interesting interaction without being too gimmicky. There's really no comparison between smartphone games and what this system has to offer.

It also lends credence to the notion that PVG SGX543 is more than capable of taking Tegra head on.

very much agreed.

Q:
who makes the SoC?
is it manufactured at 28nm?

Good question. I haven't the foggiest.

Anyone care to weigh in?

the timing makes 28nm possible, but really tight margin.

however, i have doubts about battery life for a quad-core CPU/quad-core GPU device manufactured on 40/45nm........

I don't know man... some of the polished iOS games now are already damn good, and that's 1-2 gens behind the NGP. They will surely advance, along with the higher cpu and gpu power of iPhone 5 and iPad 2.

And iOS has a more developed (and bigger) market for digitally distributed mobile apps. This will affect the type and budget of the games....

No doubt that the NGP definitely has an edge with its control schemes (multitouch, back panel touch, accelerometers, DUAL ANALOG STICK, d-pad and the buttons, etc);... and they surely will bring the 'serious' game developers

So this is definitely going to be an interesting 'fight' and the consumer will be the beneficiary

ps: I just bought Dead Space for iPad... it is pretty dang AMAZING! The gfx, control scheme, playability.. atmosphere. I've to say it ranks nearly up there with the xbox 360's!

Speaking strictly about graphics:

Indeed, future hardware (potentially even the next iOS devices) will be able to compete nicely or even surpass the NGP. This space is rapidly progressing and enticing new SoCs by TI, Qualcomm, and NVidia are showing significant advancement from one generation to the next and moblie GPUs like GeForce, Adreno, Mali, PVR are showing very impressive capabilities.

As of right now, though, the NGP is a force and is basically unmatched in terms of graphic potential. This is due to the hardware and the console-like software that allows developers to go extremely close to the metal in a way general purpose OSs don't allow (Carmack, the notorious performance whore, testifies to this).

But who knows how long it will be before smartphones catch up?

Games like Infinity Blade, Deadspace, and Rage are very beautiful, but they comparatively derive the majority of their good looks (and they are most impressive) from artistic direction rather than hardware potential. Now by artistic direction, I mean making good decisions (and by implication compromises) to maximize visual punch.

For example, Deadspace features very nice baked lighting and somewhat simple environments to perhaps compensate for more detailed character artwork. Infinity Blade seems to feature complex (albeit mostly static) characters and environments, but the action seems to generally takes place in a single room -- which is a good way to limit memory concerns. Rage, seems to trades character complexity for virtual textures that must be streamed from the media and introduce latency.

What all of these titles seem to forgo is complex shaders, which is something that's in each and every one of the NGP videos in addition to very impressive polygon counts (additional cores help here).

Another thing to keep in mind is that these are release titles, and you can bet that developers will thoroughly strain the system as time progresses (similar to how far the iPhone/iPad has).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyNSJHafxrA

Please don't misunderstand. I'm not trying to start a device war or deprecate a singleton. I think that the iPhone/iPad/GalaxyS/Tab/Atrix/Optimus devices are devices with very powerful internals. It's just that as of today NGP is the graphical alpha in the announced devices pack. Woof.

But this may change in a month. Who knows?

On another note: the Tegra 250 is quite a promising technology, but I'd like to see something that utilizes more shaders and on a device that doesn't demand that it fill 1280x800 pixels (ahem: xoom) -- which will undeniably hurt frame rates. It's hard to get a feel for it's capabilities when there's nothing other than Dungeon Defenders and a bunch o' Nvidia propaganda PDFs as representatives.

Something tells me that the iPad 2/iPhone 5 will be blessed with the SGX543, though. But I stand by my prediction: no retina display!

John Carmack had an interesting view as to why the NGP will outperform smartphones with similar specs that may become available in the future.

http://www.industrygamers.com/news/j...d-smartphones/