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Carmack Says NGP Is a 'Generation Beyond' Smartphones
donniebaseball23 writes "id co-founder and all-around programming genius John Carmack, who has become a bigger fan of the iPhone and iOS platform recently, has given his take on the technical aspects of Sony's Next Generation Portable. He says that 'the Sony NGP [will] perform about a generation beyond smart phones with comparable specs.' Essentially, the fast approaching round of iOS and Android devices will still be well behind the capabilities of Sony's new handheld, which comes close to reproducing PS3-like visuals."
New details have emerged since the NGP's confirmation yesterday: there will be different versions of the device, all of which can connect over Wi-Fi, but only one of which has 3G connectivity. The battery life will be similar to the original PSP, and the NGP will have two proprietary memory card slots. Sony says they considered 3D for the device, but they don't see how it translates to portable gaming. 1up has a hands-on with the NGP, as well as video of Epic's Unreal Engine 3 tech demo.
Not to worry - only for less than a year (if even that)
One that hath name thou can not otter
"The Jaguar is 64 bit! Not as powerful as the N64, but more powerful than the 32 bit Sony Playstation." - Jack Tramel, Atari
"The PS2 will be able to do Toy Story graphics in real time!" - Sony
"The PS3 will be so great, people will WANT to pay $700 to get it!" - Ken Kutaragi
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
Fool me 4 times, shame on both of us.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
CD was developed jointly with Phillips, and Phillips is generally more credited with pushing CDs as a standard (most of the actual standards documents were released by Phillips.)
DVD was also jointly developed by Phillips and Sony, but it was based mostly on a previous standard by Toshiba.
Sony came out with a 3" floppy standard that went nowhere. A consortium of companies took the standard and developed the 3.5" floppy standard.
Betacam was a good professional format widely used, just like DAT, though not adopted widely by the general public.
So, yeah, when Sony teams up with Phillips to develop new media they hit home runs. On their own - not so much (Beta, 3" Floppy, Consumer DAT, Minidisc, Memory Stick...)
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Video8 was never a pro format! It was better than VHS-C, but barely. Both Video8 and Hi8 were much more consumer focussed, although there were some pro Hi8 cameras.
MiniDisc is also far from a flop - it is used extensively in the radio industry and in ENG applications and is still one of the best replacements for cassette tape as a re-recordable medium. It failed in the consumer space because the consumer-level decks had the stupid Serial Copy Management System that prevented you making digital copies more than one generation deep (even of your own stuff), which the pro-hardware didn't have. It also faced the rise of the mp3 player. It was also pretty successful in the UK market before mp3 came along, with several manufacturers selling portable and deck players and combined HiFi systems with MD built in. The pre-recorded market never took off - there was no benefit over CD at the time, but as a re-recordable format it was a huge hit.
Posted here in full:
"Low level APIs will allow the Sony NGP to perform about a generation beyond smart phones with comparable specs."
Carmack isn't saying that the hardware in the NGP is a generation ahead of smart phones. He's saying that because of the APIs available to developers they'll be able to utilise that hardware more effectively (specifically that a developer will be able to squeeze an extra generation's worth of performance out of hardware with approx. the same specifications), which makes sense once you consider that the games are pretty much running on the bare metal, and that the entire system is optimised for gaming.
George Wright