Although Apple already promotes the iPhone and iPod touch as very capable gaming devices, the recently-announced 3G S handset will offer even more potential for more elaborate titles in the coming months. At least that's what many are hoping following reports detailing its souped-up innards. According to Anand Lal Shimpi from Anandtech, Apple has made the jump from a 412MHz ARM11 processor core to a 600MHz ARM Cortex A8, and added a PowerVR SGX 520 graphics processor supporting OpenGL ES 2.0 along with double the amount of DDR memory at 256MB.
The company claims real world performance of the iPhone 3GS can be up to 2x faster than its predecessor. Additionally, however, Anandtech says the new graphics core has 7x the geometry throughput of the iPhone 3G and 2.5x the fill rate. Sure, it may not hold a candle to your desktop gaming rig, but it will certainly be interesting to see what these extra capabilities will allow in terms of games. Interestingly, the just-released Pre uses the same CPU/GPU configuration as Apple, so Palm fans won't have to feel outclassed.