So Sony has unveiled the NGP to a mixed jury at the moment – no one can really say anything about it until it arrives in the market at the end of this year, but id Software co-founder John Carmack has already weighed in with his views, stating that, performance-wise, the Sony NGP is in an entirely different class compared to current (and we suspect, the immediate future) smartphones where portable gaming is concerned. In fact, he thinks that the Sony NGP will be one “generation beyond” (smartphones) in terms of performance, even though phones will ship with equivalent hardware, including quad-core processors.
Sony, after all, will have the advantage of low-level programming access which will definitely help it run games smoothly and faster compared to relying on a higher level APIs such as OpenGL.
Publisher‘s note: The original Tweet from JC says “Low level APIs will allow the Sony NGP to perform about a generation beyond smart phones with comparable specs.” That means that by bypassing several layers of software and APIs, NGP developers will be able to extract performance that smartphone developers won’t be able to reach. This is quite typical in the console development world, and in fact no different from what’s happening on PSP, PS3 and Xbox 360 today.
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