ChMar
New member
1080p screen will no doubt require 2GB or RAM because of the added demand from the screen. But I suspect Microsoft won't allow higher than current 720p/768p resolution because the GPUs in current SoC can barely keep up with 720p. But for most apps (other than games), supporting of new resolutions are not that hard and in most cases, you don't even need to change your code much. Today, 768p screen maps exactly as 480p screen with 720p screen maps a little bit taller. 1080p screens will map exactly as 720p screen.
For games, most decent Android games are written in native C++, not Java, and using OpenGL. On WP8 side, decent games will be the same, written in native C++ and use Direct3D (but current WP9 is limited to Direct3D 9 level, not the newer Direct3D 11 as Windows 8 supports). So in many cases, Android games should perform similar to WP8 games if they optimized to each platform. So the real differentiate factor is the GPU power. Until Samsung Exynos 5's new GPU, most Android phone's GPU are so so and comparable to WP (they basically use the same SoC). It will be interesting to see if Microsoft will brace for the new GPU. But again, currently, that is only available from Samsung and it won't support LTE properly (so all US versions of Samsung GS4 will be Qualcomm SoC, not Exynos 5). So, until Qualcomm comes out with a equivalent GPU, we will still be short on GPU power.
1080p won't match to 720p. The multiplication factor is 1.5 not an integer value. So you will notice distortion meaning you will need to support that resolution manually not because any layout problems but because of image degradation due to up scaling. So new sdk new apps and of course the 2gb of ram.
Yes it's true GPU on wp8 is dx 9.3 feature maxed. It may someday change who knows. But having the ability to have the same codebase for wp8 and windows 8 means the games now will support some form of graphics graceful degradation to accommodate less powerful hardware just like you would code for windows 8 devices. And to be honest I don't believe GPU is the bottleneck in current mobile games.
Most games are casual games and android being so fragmented those will remain the main category of games so no problem with the GPU here. And 3d games in current gen use a lot of offline light map generated textures and are less real-time concerning lighting effects so it's not about gpu power but about gpu fill rate. And I believe this is a good call considering the screen sizes of the display and the lack of good controls. I don't see graphic hungry fps games becoming popular on mobile phones. So you remain with 3rd person graphics rich games that with good level design you can make due with a less powerful GPU(make it so that you have a lower visibility range so less objects less GPU calls).