06 September 2009

Demo Of Hardware Accelerated Bounce Boing Voyage On Nokia N900 Looks Freakin Awesome

I just came across yet another Nokia N900 walkthrough video but what makes it different from all other hands-on previews that appeared since its official release last week is the eye-catching demo of the Bounce Boing Voyage game that reveals beautiful 3D graphic which takes advantage of the build in 3D hardware graphics acceleration!

The rendering quality offered by a hardware accelerated core and the OMAP chipset is obviously a lot better than through software rendering.

The addition of high-performance hardware, Filtering Modes, MIPMapping and higher resolution textures massively improve the appearance of objects removing the ugly, pixelated blockiness seen in software rendering games on a new Nokia's N-Gage platform.

PowerVR hardware 3D graphics acceleration brings a powerful 3D experience to both casual and more advanced gamers who have come to expect high-performance gaming on their devices. Stunning hardware accelerated graphic, beautiful effect and intuitive motion based controls makes the N-Gage version of the same game silly and puts Nokia N97 to shame!

The Nokia N82 was the last company’s device based on the great OMAP chipset with support for hardware accelerated graphic and instead to continue and expand the use of high-end hardware Nokia has decided to move focus on gameplay over graphics instead of producing phones powerful enough to process high quality graphics without negative effect on the gameplay which resulted with massive migration of hard core game players to Apple’s iPhone platform!

The PowerVR hardware acceleration core from Imagination Technologies delivers the performance needed to port console class games not only to Nokia N900 but also to S60 devices powered with the OMAP3 chipset, phones like Sony Ericsson Satio or Samsung Omnia HD.

The biggest advantage hardware 3D brings is "filling power". In software accelerated 3D implementations the main processor has to take care of rendering each pixel. With hardware 3D the graphics processor takes care of this which means that the main CPU can handle everything else simultaneously with the graphics processor, significantly speeding things up.

Thanks to saved power for the CPU, it is possible to push a lot more polygons. For example, when the GPU is rendering an object, the CPU can calculate the transformations and projections for the next object. This naturally means more detailed objects in the games developed.

I just hope that high-end hardware will not remain Maemo exclusive and that Nokia will follow its competitors and use the same hardware architecture on Symbian devices as well!!

Few sample screenshots generated with OMAP 2420
(*Click to enlarge )