The folks at AllAboutSymbian are excellent when it comes to posting news – unfortunately, most of their analysts seem to be professional analysts rather than developers who turned to the writing profession for fun (and profit). This explains why blurbs like their current article on 3d chips happen…
Cutting a long story short, the folks discuss the merits of external graphics processors used in some high-end Nokia devices. So far so good – unfortunately, the editorial contains the following bone-headed passages:
The reason 3D chips are useful is partly that they allow 3D games to have much higher quality graphics, but also because (for various technical reasons) they allow game developers to create 3D games more easily. A device with a 3D chip is easier to program 3D games for than the same device without it. It’s worth emphasising though that 3D chips don’t help at all with 2D games.
Wrong. First of all, 3D chips CAN help with 2d graphics. For example, many popular Palm Os media players use the 3D engines found in Taowave’s Zodiac handhelds to accelerate video and audio playback while saving power.
Unfortunately, there’s a serious downside to this option, which is that N-Gage developers would have to make two versions of each 3D game. If they only make one version of a 3D game, it would have to be a non-chip version because that’s the only one that would work on all N-Gage phones.
Wrong, part 2. Nowadays, most developers don’t code directly against the hardware anymore. They use a part of the S60 OS that’s called OpenGL: which is an API that handles 3D primitives(objects).
OpenGL ES is implemented on each and every N-Gage phone. Phones that lack a graphical accelerator use their main processor to “emulate” the 3D chip, whereas phones with an integrated 3D chip offload the work to it and thereby achieve higher performance.
The main work for the developer is to reduce things like drawing distance and/or the number of on-screen objects in order to achieve higher/playable frame rates on software emulated devices…which usually is a manageable task.
Any more questions?
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Actually you’re wrong (AAS isn’t 100% right either, but then they’re writing for a consumer audience and as such are probably simplifying). You would need two versions of the game because you would need to optimise. Even more so since the current N-Gage SDK doesn’t support 3d hardwar. There would be a lot of shared stuff for sure, but it definitely more work than just doing it once.
3D chips do not necessarily help with 2D graphics – it depends what features they have in them. Video acceleration and audio decoding is also a different function and may not be support by the co-processor. It does depend on the phone you’re talking about but current ones do not use hardware acceleration very much for ‘ordinary graphics’ (there are exceptions of course).
Hi Ruth,
thank you so much for your email!
My development experience comes from the PC and DirectX – where the DirectX drivers emulate stuff that the native hardware found in the machine cannot do.
As already said, the main difference is optimizations…
As for video: it is a matter of optimization and the developer wanting to do it. The fol,ks at TCPMP’s managed to gain significant acceleration on many if not most PDA’s with a 3D chip…but the program also works without….
Best regards
Tam Hanna