id's Carmack: iPhone nearly as powerful as Xbox, PS2

Prove it.

If someone can hack an iPhone to run on a Halo 2 at near-identical quality, I will break my "No Apple Products in this household" pledge and buy an iPhone.

Maybe not, but I'd love to see it done, or rather I'd love to see it not done because I know this guy is just talking out of his ass; or perhaps he's been paid off by Apple in some way...

my PDA can play Super Nintendo. Screw iPhone! Ha!

well, it's fairly obvious that it will play doom... but the real question is when we will get peggle for it.

acccording to the tech specs I've found the processor is a 419Mhz ARM processor with 128MB of DRAM and a PowerVR SGX 520 (7Million Polygons a second) in comparison the PS2 has a theroetical max peak of 33 Million Polygons. it is possible that the next version of the iPhone will have a xbox comparable processor. and at which case it will be actually MORE powerful than the xbox 1 (possibly even the wii which is clocked to a "paltry" 792Mhz

*looks at iPhone* You don't matter; in fact, in just a few seconds you won't even be matter!

Yeah, the iPhone won't matter as soon as nVidia releases their "computer-on-a-chip" for personal electronics and it comes loaded in every phone on the market. Tegra can't come soon enough.

It must be true comming from Carmack but,I always thought that the dreamcast had more graphical power thant the ps2. The ps2 had less vram than the dreamcast.When they launched I had fist gen from both systems and I can remember the ps2 needing almost 2 years to have games that top what the dreamcast had at launch. I must have rememberd that wrong because Carmack has worked (if I'm not mistaken) on both systems but.

so powerful it doesnt need buttons or a replacable battery!

BTW BlackBerry Thunder with localized haptic feedback touch screen FTW...

iWaggle?

Can people please clarify whether the power or performance is identical?

Just because an architecture is as powerful as another, doesn't mean it's as fast. Think about the 16-bit vs 32-bit war that happened more than a decade ago, or try to compare a 100MHz Sun workstation to a 500MHz Pentium.

Also, the main processors in the PS2 have been miniaturized into a single chip in the PS2 slim, but it still requires a heatsink and fan. I doubt a similar architecture could be stuffed into an iPhone without some serious heat issues, even with the latest chip manufacturing process. Something doesn't sound right.

Is it as powerful as a PS2 or is it as powerful as an Xbox? I mean, the Xbox was churning out damn good (even if not perfect) ports of Doom3 and Half Life 2 at the end there...never saw anything even approaching that on the PS2, except maybe Black.

Its only a matter of time before we are playing gears on our iphones :)

HAHA! I knew it. GameCube ownzed Xbox and PlayStation 2!

Crappy battery life? Uh i am not sure why 4-5 hours of intense use like playing movies etc.. is considered bad. I use it all day and it doesnt need charging till bedtime. Yeah your jokes are so funny people, "i will get to the title screen and the battery will die" ... leave the humor to the professionals you aint funny, only funny looking. Thats the best that technology these days will allow in such a small device so it isnt apples fault geniuses. For those sick of the iphone hype get over it. Its an amazing device that you probably never used or are on some crappy cell carrier and cant get it. Yes the iphone doesnt have a control pad and it holds it back somewhat but games like crash racing where you tap the screen to jump doesnt take that much away from the enjoyment of the game. As for the slow frame rates one dude said, its probably developers rushing the game out to make a quick buck or they arent great in the first place. I dont see the iphone being as powerful as an xbox or whatever but a few devs like sega have talked about its power so who are us average people to doubt them?

Anyway the email was directed at just few negative comments on here, call me a fanboy i dont care i dont know you people nor do i care to. people that post in here just to be negative are pathetic anyway. make an intelligent contribution or if you dont like the iphone why read the article? get a life, get laid, get something just get out of here since u arent interested. its pretty pathetic, i know go over to ps3fanboy.com and talk bad about ps3, or xbox360fanboy.com and talk bad about xbox.

also to the guy who said the iphone runs slow when running two programs, stop making lies. iphone owners check email, go on the web and play music and it runs better than a pc. a pc with vista installed runs 100x poorer than a tiny iphone that makes you think how crappy pc's really are. glad i traded my pc for a mac in january. best decision ever and i did it cause of vista. not once has my mac crashed since january, i have no virus software cause its not needed, i dont have to defrag and run diagnostics. if you make a comment like the iphone cant run 2 programs we all know your just making up crap cause your a hater and you need to think before doing something that stupid

shocking-another day of rants against the iPhone by the masses. You all are way too threatened by a phone.

Customer: Wow! the 3D is so cool! better than the PSP!

Apple Sales: Yep, here're some incredible 3D games. Let's give this FPS a try.

Customer: Alright!
Customer: So, umm, how do you shoot that guy?

Apple Sales: Oh, just touch him.

Customer: .... o...kay...

Apple Sales: here's the good part, rub the bad guy with 2 fingers.

Customer: !!!

Why aren't sony making awesome hybrid device phones?

They never managed to compete with the ipod in the music arena, but their walkman phones are great, they have lots of playstation/psp experience, and they make great cameras.

They should be able to make the coolest phone/ipod/psp/camera combo ever.

Dreamcast used the POWER VR 2 GPU for it's 3D Graphics.

The iPhone uses the new version POWER VR 3.

So yeah the iPhone should be better than Dreamcast since it's graphics tech is based of a more advanced version of the Dreamcast GPU.

And what the industry, nay, we gamers really needs is more PS2-ports! Is that iCookie&uCream i hear approaching ? :)

For the price it should be as powerful as a PS3.