Nokia has finally given a clear statement that there WILL be enhanced versions of N-Gage games for phones with 3D acceleration chips. Phones without the chips will get the same games, but because they use software to generate 3D their graphics will be less snazzy-looking.
Read on in the full article.
Im getting 404 errors on some links your posting today.
Is it true the N96 and other upcoming phones dont have these 3d chips the N95/N81 etc has?
Can you give some examples of links with 404 errors so we can fix them? Thanks for letting us know by the way.
As far as I know the N96 does have a 3D chip. All of Nokia's smartphones with TV Out have a 3D chip, because the 3D chip also provides the TV Out feature.
The N81 does NOT have a 3D chip.
Nokia has just given a big speech on using 3D hardware in phone games, and it's extremely unlikely they'd do that if they were going to stop making phones with 3D hardware.
Im reading so many things in so many places on the net its hard to keep a track on whats true and whats not.
The N81 was my mistake though, I just assumed it had one due to it being for gaming.
The 404's, the link in your initial post on this thread: http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/6771_Nokia_talks_3D_hardware_finall.php
And one from the 'One' website: http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/6770_ONE_official_website_launches.php
Both return a 404, its possible its my connection but I havent had any trouble with anything else this morning.
The TV Out chip and 3D chip are the same thing, so if you want to know which S60 phones have a 3D chip, just look for ones that have TV Out support.
It is weird that the N81 doesn't have a 3D chip, like you say Nokia advertised it as having a lot of gaming capability.
Regarding the 404s, did you get those links from the forums?
They should have allaboutngage instead of allaboutsymbian in the middle of the URLs, there's a bug in the way the AAS system posts news items to the forum from All About N-Gage.
We'll try to get this fixed! 😊
Yup, the forums.
Nokias specs pages dont seem to say if theres a 3d chip or not, so I assume its only ones that have TV out.
Until we get the forum bug fixed, can you visit the links through AAN's main site?
Sorry about this, but the links do work if you navigate through the site itself.
I don't really understand why Forum Nokia doesn't mention the 3D chip, they mention practically all other specs!
But like I said, so far they've always used the same chip for 3D and TV Out so that's presumably the best guide to finding 3D chip phones.
Oh no worries, I was just pointing it out for referance.
Im finding it increasingly hard to find one place that gives a full spec list.
One has everything but screen size, another didnt mention the 6210N has an accelerometer, etc.
Forum Nokia is probably the best place, it's meant for developers so it tries to give as many technical details as possible:
http://www.forum.nokia.com/devices/matrix_all_1.html
...but even Forum Nokia doesn't mention the 3D chips directly, just the TV Out. Hopefully that will change once the 3D chip enhanced games start appearing.
Thats the one that misses screen sizes. Bizzarre that.
I think they leave out the physical screen size because it's not relevant to software developers (which is who Forum Nokia is aimed at). The only thing the developers have to know about a screen is its resolution and colour depth, though I agree it would be nice if they mentioned the size too as this can really affect how well some apps work.
The E90 has 3d acceleration, but not TV out...
Oh wow! i was beginning to think that including phones like the N73 would decrease the quality of games in average, but nice knowing they're doing this! woot!
Nokia n96 has no 3D acceleration and that was asked from n96 product manager. Video acceleration and 3d acceleration are completely different things. Probably lack of 3d hw acceleration saves battery life.
TomJ wrote:The E90 has 3d acceleration, but not TV out...
E90 is not N-Series...
Nokia n96 has no 3D acceleration and that was asked from n96 product manager.
Aha, interesting, any chance of a link to the interview?
It would be nice to know exactly what he/she said, because I'm still sceptical about this.
The Forum Nokia page for the N96 has a recommended SDK concerning hardware graphics acceleration on S60, it seems odd to recommend such an SDK if the N96 contains no graphics hardware.
I don't fully trust what product managers claim as I've heard Nokia product managers claim that N-Gage games cannot run on Eseries devices, which doesn't make any sense because they're all the same S60 3rd Edition software platform.
Video acceleration and 3d acceleration are completely different things.
All that was talked about was that the same chip provides both 3D graphics acceleration and TV Out on the N93, N95 and N82. Because the N96 has TV Out, it presumably would also have 3D acceleration like its predecessors.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "video acceleration", if you're not referring to a 3D graphics chip.
Probably lack of 3d hw acceleration saves battery life.
AFAIK the mere presence of 3D hardware wouldn't reduce battery life. It would only reduce battery life if you actually used the chip in an application (and at the moment no apps do this).
The E90 has 3d acceleration, but not TV out...
From what I understand, the E90 includes hardware for TV Out but Nokia chose not to use it.
In any case, E90 isn't part of N-Gage (yet) so there was no point listing it.
bartmanekul wrote:Im getting 404 errors on some links your posting today.Is it true the N96 and other upcoming phones dont have these 3d chips the N95/N81 etc has?
I've interviewed the PowerVR folks at MWC (see my related, cross-posted article in the N95 forum here). They stated they consider the N96 just a niche device purely for DVB-H fans (and not current owners of the N95 (8GB) or the N82), and, in their opinion, several future Nokia devices WILL have 3D acceleration.
krisse wrote:AFAIK the mere presence of 3D hardware wouldn't reduce battery life. It would only reduce battery life if you actually used the chip in an application (and at the moment no apps do this).
Furthermore, using dedicated 3D (or, for that matter, for example video decoding) acceleration hardware may even result in a FAR lower CPU usage, meaning definitely lower overall power consumption. (This has also been stated by the Imagination folks and has also been the case on, say, the 2700G-based Dell Axim x50v/x51v.)
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krisse wrote:The TV Out chip and 3D chip are the same thing, so if you want to know which S60 phones have a 3D chip, just look for ones that have TV Out support.
Sorry Krisse, but that's not quite how it goes.
TV-Out requires a mechanism for converting progressive scan RGB to interlaced YUV and usually also resolution scaling. Ideally this is handled by dedicated hw. 3D hw on the other hand handles above all rasterization of a virtual 3D world view onto a 2D frame, like a projection. Some 3D hw additionally handles the transformation and lighting of the vertices in 3D space, and thereby offloads the CPU even more. (and yes, OpenGL ES 2.0 hw execute shader programs for both vertices and fragments, but let's not go there yet)
The OMAP2420 chip used in N95 for example does both TV-Out and 3D acceleration + a bunch of other useful stuff, but that doesn't mean that those two functionalities would always be tied together. There should be platforms in Nokia's hw roadmaps that do just one of these two functionalities, so don't expect that one of these features always also means the other.
krisse wrote:It is weird that the N81 doesn't have a 3D chip, like you say Nokia advertised it as having a lot of gaming capability.
Sorry Krisse for correcting you again,
N81 is quite a capable gaming phone despite the lack of 3D hw. As 3D hw support was only recently announced for the N-Gage platform, all N-Gage games so far are software rendering, and thereby don't utilize the 3D hw even in phones that have such. I could write a novel about this subject, but won't bug you now more than this.
Both happy & relieved to hear this news, came very close to purchasing the Nokia N81 mainly as a gaming device, held off though as I didn't like the sound of the lacking 3d accelerator chip present in the N95 etc.)
There's an interesting comparison video on youtube showing the difference the accelerator chip makes to 3d games(on Global Race), look here The difference is certainly significant.
Just recently decided to purchase a Nokia N93 as it looks like a good all rounder for phone and gaming purposes, just checked and I see it does have the chip, phew😎
Tetlee wrote:Both happy & relieved to hear this news, came very close to purchasing the Nokia N81 mainly as a gaming device, held off though as I didn't like the sound of the lacking 3d accelerator chip present in the N95 etc.)There's an interesting comparison video on youtube showing the difference the accelerator chip makes to 3d games(on Global Race), look here The difference is certainly significant.
Just recently decided to purchase a Nokia N93 as it looks like a good all rounder for phone and gaming purposes, just checked and I see it does have the chip, phew😎
As earlier said, N81 is quite a capable gaming device, starting from the N-Gage game support. Even though there is no 3D accelerator, there is the ARM11 core with the VFP, if your game supports acceleration using that.
That Global Race example does not reflect real game performance difference using hw/sw rendering. For real gaming quality comparison, there should be a propriatery rasterizer optimized for that particular game for sw rendering, including artwork optimization for that particular hw. That is in the end how real game developers handle these things. The frame rates would then be far closer to similar between to two versions, and the remaining differences would be texture filtering and possibly Anti-Aliasing on hw. Neither of these would be visible on such video quality, so even the rendering quality difference would be fairly subtle. In that video the N81 obviously runs OpenGL ES in software for rasterization, and that's not how pros make their games.
If you can live with the size of the N93, you've done a great choice. N93 was in my personal use for a year and a half, which is an eternity for a Nokia employee. Only the 8GB N95 managed to make me give up my beloved N93, and I still miss its optical zoom. Then again, I'm very picky in these things, and it is very possible I'll spend the next year and a half with this N95 8GB, until a IMHO superior device hits the market 😊
patric you're telling me 3D hw accelerated games wouldn't have noticeable difference in terms of visuals compared to the software rendered version, even if it's on a cellphone with QVGA resolutions?? You have GOT to be kidding me! The N95's hw accelerator does free bilinear texture filtering and free FSAA (since it's a TBDR), so that's not even what it's really all about. The really awesome things it can do is vertex skinning, curved surface rendering, and DOT3 bump mapping. Can a software renderer mimic something that looks like DOT3 bump mapping?? Heck, even the PSP can't do DOT3 bump mapping. It has a fully programmable vertex geometry co-processor for T&L and vertex shading, meaning we can expect really complicated lighting and polygons etc. At least I'm happy to hear that even a Nokia employee thinks the N96 is not superior to the N95 8GB 😉 .
In his defence, I don't think that the N96 was released back in March 😊
> there should be a propriatery rasterizer optimized for that particular game for sw rendering, including artwork optimization for that particular hw. That is in the end how real game developers handle these things.
This is exactly the problem that I have been trying to make clear to Tzer2 (and anyone else who might listen!) in the past.
Developers want to do as little work as possible, in general. If they can write their renderer once with OpenGL ES and have it run on iPhone, Android, Brew, some WM, some S60 - isn't that better for them?
Aren't they more likely to port their apps/games to a device that doesn't involve them rewriting the renderer from scratch?
To force them to analyse the performance of each device they port to in various situations is terrible. Only developers with a lot of previous experience with embedded development, or S60 development in particular, would want to do that. Most developers focus on high-level lanaguages these days and don't want to have to hand-optimise assembly to get an engine to run reasonably.