iPad game display modes compared

February 5th, 2010, 21:47 Posted By: wraggster



When we saw the iPad at Apple's less-than-exciting unveiling event, we noted that the upscaling on iPhone games was a bit blurry. But, hey, we're no certified graphicsologists or anything. Luckily, Kevin Ng is, and through the help of the iPad SDK, he's compared the appearance of his game WordCrasher running on the device in several ways: at native iPhone resolution; using the iPad's zoomed-in "2X mode" and -- through a little bit of tweaking with the SDK -- full iPad resolution.

His results in running WordCrasher at native iPhone resolution and in "2X mode" pretty much mirrored our own observations: standard and pretty ugly, respectively. When blowing up the iPhone version's graphics on the iPad, jaggies became prominent and it was a pretty ugly experience overall. However, when Ng rolled up his sleeves and started fiddling around, he found that tweaking his game to run at the iPad's native 1024X768 resolution helped create some strong visuals.

Ng credits the device's support of OpenGL ES 2.0, which allowed him to "use bump maps and other shader techniques to present more realistic materials." Again, we're not graphicsticians (see? we can't even get the term right!), but it seems like the initial cries at the device's inability to make teh purty pics may have been a bit unfounded.

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/02/05/ip...odes-compared/

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