30 December 2006

PowerVR Brings
Console Quality Gaming To Mobiles

Quake III Arena playable on a Dell Axim x50v/x51v PDA thanks to PowerVR

What games do you play on your Phone - Solitaire? Blackjack? Maybe something better like SkyForce Reloaded or Lock ‘n’ Load, maybe even C2Doom emulator. But why not make your PSP-playing mates jealous by whipping out your N93 and firing up Quake III Arena?

You see, I’ve just found something really catching my eye on the Symbian Freak Forum section, Sskillz, has post and interesting topic about a year or even older article over the bit-tech.net that shows it’s a PowerVR-enabled Dell Axim X51v running Quake 3 arena!

Yeah, Quake III Arena, you see if you've been here for long enough then you're well aware that we have already spotted that Nokia N93 is the first Nokia phone with HW accelerated 3D graphics and OpenGL ES (1.1) support and after some research we have found that N93 uses PowerVR MBX 2D/3D graphics accelerator from Imagination Technology incorporated into Texas Instrument’s OMAP2420.

With the high end PC market secured by ATI and NVIDIA, PowerVR is now concentrating on the portable market with its latest design, the low power PowerVR MBX which has become the de facto standard for mobile 3D, having been licensed by six of the top ten semiconductor manufacturers including Intel, Texas Instruments, Samsung, Philips, Freescale, Renesas, and Sunplus.

In November 2005 Imagination Technologies are at the Korean Games Conference / G Star 2005 demonstrating Quake Mobile from Pulse Interactive and Quake III Arena from NoctemWare on the PowerVR-enabled Dell Axim X51v.

Christien Rioux of NoctemWare has ported the recently-GPL-released Quake III Arena from id Software to Windows CE 4.2 for Pocket PC, utilising its SpeedDemon Windows CE profiler. The latest version (Q3CE v1.1) includes direct support for hardware acceleration through OpenGL ES for the PowerVR-enabled Dell Axim x50v/x51v. Q3CE is currently achieving up to 25 fps on the Dell Axim X50v, and is "totally playable" on the 3.7-inch 640x480 colour TFT screen.

So, considering that N93 is based on the same architecture as the Dell Axim x50v/x51v and uses PowerVR MBX 2D/3D graphics accelerator from Imagination Technology I’m just curious is it powerful enough to run such a complex 3D game like Quake III Arena is!?

OF course, N93’s processor isn’t as fast as Axim’s, 330MHz ARM11 vs. the Intel XScale PXA270 Processor at 624MHz but from other side, N93 has 4 times less pixels to process, QVGA (320*240) vs. VGA (640*480).

So, in short, maybe I am little bit to optimistic but I guess that you are quite agree with me that it will be amazing to play such a games on our favorites devices, Nokia N93 or upcoming Nokia N95, if nothing else the future of mobile gaming on smartphones looks really great and promising.

Sincerely yours,
SF team
Teo Bartulovic
SF Founder/Owner