Portable game consoles have one big problem: Tablets. Tablets are refreshed pretty much yearly; Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon fire them out like clockwork, every year. True, tablet processors are a bit behind, say, the more advanced desktops.
But the simple fact of the matter is that Moore’s Law is on the side of tablets.
And now there’s a a benchmark that should make Sony very, very nervous.
It’s pretty straightforward, really, as VentureBeat explains:
The new iPad uses the new A6X processor, which includes a new graphics processing unit (GPU) that is twice as powerful as the third-generation iPad. As we noted in our review of the PlayStation Vita, the Vita has a nearly identical GPU to the third-generation iPad. The only differences are the clock speed and design architecture (to fit the Vita’s processor). This latest iPad — which is a tablet, not a dedicated game console — has a more powerful GPU than the PlayStation Vita.
This doesn’t mean the fourth generation iPad is going to destroy the Vita: Raw graphical power isn’t everything, not least because the Vita has a few other advantages, like actual buttons, a smaller screen, and the fact the Vita actually has a better CPU, with a quad-core processor that can get up to double the speed of the current iPad.
That said, though, Moore’s Law is not Sony’s friend, here. And it makes sense to compare the two, as the Vita is the victim of increasingly lowered sales expectations and increasingly mobile games are selling more, although mobile is not necessarily the land of plenty even when you make an awesome game.
It probably says a lot that Microsoft is rumored to be getting into portables… with a 7-inch tablet.
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Isnt the Vita like half the price of a new iPad though? And no contract for the 3G service? Im not really understanding why Sony should be worried about this. They should be more worried about the sales projections being revised downward, which I dont think the tablet market it taking a significant chunk out of.
The Vita will only attract hardcore gamers, no matter what Sony says about it being designed for the casual gamer. It is first and foremost a gaming system. I want one, but Im not paying $250 for a bundle. I can wait for the next price drop and the games I really want, will be even cheaper then. Everything else, the media players, the internet access and interactivity are secondary byproducts or must have add ons that people will complain about not having even though they rarely use those features if they arent there. A tablet is designed to take a chunk out of the laptop and PC market, not portable gaming, although this may change in the future. The growing gaming market for tablets seems to be a byproduct of the ever increasing power of the processors, but arent most tablet games simple time wasters? I mean I dont see myself playing something like Call of Duty(HA! duty…), Assassins Creed or Uncharted on a tablet. I tend to play Angry Birds, Plants vs Zombies, Granny Smith and other simple time wasters on my tablet and phone. Those seem to be the most profitable types of games.
I think its an interesting development, but nothing that should have Sony worried.
Various forms of those games do exist on tablets though and asset portability is pretty easy for games built on the Unreal engine as that exists for pretty much every platform. If they redesign their control scheme to be tablet optimized they’re pretty okay, it is when they go “fuck it” and make it a button and d-pad system that it really shits the bed.
Yeah, the main problem with tablets is that nobody is innovating or trying to with control schemes.
There you go with that weird mobile CPU comparison again. For a specialized device like the Vita it might be accurate if the development tools actually make threading easily doable like the iOS tools do with Grand Central Dispatch. Plus the iPad 4 is now on the A6 which only the Snapdragon S4 dual core krait processors are competitive with.
Ultimately it is pretty simple solution for Sony to counter. Both the iPad 2/3 used similar PowerVR GPUs as the Vita. The new iPad 4 uses the next step up PowerVR GPU. Now unless the Vita development kit is so locked into the shipping hardware specs nothing really prevents the next model of the Vita from shipping with the upgraded PowerVR design.
I’m just going by the specs, really.
I stole this from another comment, but it makes a lot of sense.
At the hardware level it is certainly faster, its newer, you would expect it…. There is a hidden cost that since the D3D/GL battle 10 years ago nobody ever talks about and that is the CPU cost of building the GPU commands – the overhead of the API.. At the API level the Vita wins hands down, GLes is not a great API for these embedded chips, there is a lot of voodoo behind the scenes.. The gxm API on Vita is made for that GPU and has significanlty less overhead and exposes the native way the GPU works.. This in no way means the GPU is faster but it does mean the CPU doesn’t spend as long driving the GPU so there are more cycles left over for other stuff, there are also some things you can do natively which are difficult behind an API. It also means a Vita game typically has more objects in the scene as the API ovehead is usually the limiting factor when there are lots of small objects instead of a few big ones.
An example would be high end post effects.. The PVR is a tile renderer so getting access to the depth of frame buffers is not cheap.. On the iPad it just works, just like it does on tiled hardware, but you do pay a huge cost in synchronization on both the GPU and CPU. On the Vita you have access to the tile synchronization so you can work with the GPU to avoid the cost.
Don’t discredit hardware access and what it buys you, there is a lot more to the story than raw numbers.. Look at the PS3, with games like “The Last of Us” is still holding its own even though its effectively a DX9 class GTX6800 which hasn’t been available in a PC for 6+ years.
I’m not saying don’t support GL but if Apple made a native API it would be game over.
For me this raises the question of what happens in two years with Android.
Who cares if your over-priced iPad rocks a newer CPU and GPU? It doesn’t change the fact that the games on smartphones and tablets will still be garbage.