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Apple

iPhone 3G S has promising gaming capabilities

By Jose Vilches, TechSpot.com
Published: June 11, 2009, 11:28 AM EST
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.

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User Comments (6)

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yukka
on June 11, 2009
11:47 AM
It will be "interesting" to see how they market games for the newer system compared to the old one. Will there be lower detail options or games that will be 3G-S only?

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Technochicken
on June 11, 2009
2:11 PM
Hopefully the extra ram will help reduce the amount of app crashes iphones have also, since their memory seems to fill up very quickly. This is great news for playing some of the current iphone games too. My 1st generation iPod Touch stutters on a lot of 3d/simulation games.

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foogan
on June 12, 2009
5:39 AM
About bloody time. The iPhone 3G and the first-gen iPhone were horribly slow from 2.x on. Maybe the 3G S will have enough balls to handle the overbloated OSes Apple keeps throwing at the iPhones.

2.0+ on a first gen or 3G iPhone kind of reminds me of those Entry level PCs that everyone's parents bought a couple years ago.. You know the ones that came with Vista, but only 512mb RAM??? Theese conditions bee treacherous for surfin', arrr.

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Guest
on June 12, 2009
9:40 AM
WOW!! (sarcastic) Now if only it worked as a smartphone and not a MP3 player / Gaming device.

How about fixing the mail app to not be so clumsy?
How come I cant invite someone with a calendar event!
WTF APPLE!

Make this a smart phone not a toy.
The iphone is great if you want to pretend you are important and doing work on your phone, Then you notice the person is just playing ishoot or ifart.

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Technochicken
on June 12, 2009
10:04 AM
What's wrong with the email app?

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Rick
on June 12, 2009
1:11 PM
Interestingly, the just-released Pre uses the same CPU/GPU configuration as Apple
That is facinating.

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