Possible N-Gage 2 specs?

want a cookie, i got the first post

Right, interesting specs, now what about the price? Can that compete with the DS/PSP?

I'm not completely up to speed on what all the specs mean but I think graphics feature-wise it's somewhere around the level of current generation consoles.

Full screen anti-aliasing (getting rid of jagged lines at the edges of things for those that don't know) at 640x480 on a portable though? If that's true then it'll look beyond smooth.

nokia needs to give it up.

Full screen anti-aliasing (FSAA) is nice, but most game developers never utilize the feature because of the performance hit. Xbox supports hardware-based FSAA yet what game uses it? Developers would rather push more polygons and let televisions (which are decidedly low-quality compared to computer monitors) smooth the image out. That won't fly as more people use higher-resolution displays. If this can TRULY provide FSAA with no performance loss, other console makers should use the same technology.

Overall, these look like decent specs on paper. How that translates into a device and games is a completely different story.

A decent marriage between cell-phone and game console is inevitable. People carry their cell phone with them everywhere. Why shouldn't it be home to your music/video/game device as well? It simply may take a long, long time to achieve the perfect blend of features, size, usability and battery life to make the perfect device. I applaud Nokia for trying, but I won’t award them my $$$ until they get it right and make it affordable. Until then, I’ll continue to play Genesis and SNES games on my Treo.

Here's the deal about these so-called N-Gage 2 specs. They appear to be nothing more than the specs for the PowerVR MBX[1] graphics system. Texas Instruments has been hyping up[2] the integration of its OMAP[3] platform with this chip lately, and specifically the OMAP2420[4] because... well... it's a pretty neat piece of tech, and TI would like to sell a whole bunch of them.

It's true that the PowerVR MBX data sheet[5,6] notes - on page 1, column 2, final paragraph - that "reference implementations are available for the following: OpenGL ES[7] on SymbianOS and Linux; Direct3D on Windows CE; and MGL (PowerVR's native API) on SymbianOS and Linux", and it's also true that some Nokia phones use the OMAP platform[8] (see final paragraph), but this doesn't necessarily imply anything about the N-Gage successor.

I could go on at length about why tile-based deferred rendering is cool, but I'll stick to the executive summary instead: deferred rendering is nifty because it uses a clever technique to basically throw out a huge proportion of work that is wastefully performed by traditional renderers, though newer devices are getting smarter. This technique is light on RAM and bandwidth, and easily paralellizable, too, which means that it scales easily both upward (for high-end arcade boards) and downward (for power-efficient low-end graphics solutions like PDAs and cell phones).

The other neat thing about deferred rendering is that it concentrates more on what part of the scene is visible from each individual pixel than on which polygons to render. This means that it's relatively easy to encode an object as a higher-order surface - an equation representing a curve, for example, instead of a triangle. The equation could then only be evaluated for those pixels at which it would be visible, allowing for some neat effects.

Anyhow, there's a lot more information out there about tile-based deferred renderers. If you're interested, google PowerVR, or Kyro, or Stellar Semiconductor / PixelSquirt, or Neon250, or GigaPixel (though they were bought by 3dfx)... there's a wealth of knowledge out there.

The short of it, though, is that this is a copy of the spec sheet of a graphics core and a reference platform, not [necessarily] anything to do with the N-Gage 2.

====
[1]: www.powervr.com/Products/Graphics/MBX/index.asp
[2]: www.imgtec.com/News/Release/index.asp?ID=243
[3]: focus.ti.com/omap/docs/omaphomepage.tsp?navigationId=9289&
templateId=5663
[4]: focus.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbuproductcontent.tsp?
templateId=6123&navigationId=11990&path=templatedata/
cm/product/data/omap_2420
[5]: www.powervr.com/Downloads/Factsheets/PowerVRMBX.pdf
[6]: www.powervr.com/Downloads/Factsheets/
[7]: www.khronos.org/opengles/
[8]: focus.ti.com/docs/pr/pressrelease.jhtml?prelId=sc05040

Cool it off guys, it's not April Fool's day yet!

Didn't the Dreamcast use a PowerVR chipset?