Report: iPhone 3GS Graphics Boost Recalls Early Days of PC Gaming

Apple's recently announced iPhone 3GS will sport a new video camera and a digital compass, but it's the increased processing horsepower that is stirring up the mobile gaming space.

According to AnandTech, the iPhone 3GS' graphics chip can produce 7 million triangles and render 250 million pixels per second running in its lowest configuration, representing "7x the geometry throughput of the iPhone 3G and 2.5x the fill rate."

"Even if the SGX ran at half that speed, we'd still be at 3.5x the geometry performance of the iPhone 3G and a 25% increase in fill rate," wrote AnandTech's Anand Lal Shimpi.

Concludes Shimpi: "The iPhone 3GS may be a mild upgrade from a consumer perspective, but what it's going to enable is far from it; watch out Nintendo. Remember the performance gains we saw in the early days of 3D graphics on the PC? We're about to go through all of that once more in the mobile space."

While no applications that require an iPhone 3GS have been announced, one iPhone developer already has plans to design 3GS-optimized games with enhanced graphics.

"We're scaling the imagery based on the performance of the device, so if you've got a 3GS, the game's going to look better and run at a great framerate," said ngmoco's Neil Young to MTV. "And if you're on an iPhone 3G, the game will look a little bit different, but the framerate will be the same"

When asked whether ngcomo would consider developing games exclusively for the 3GS, Young replied: "I don’t think so. I think we'll continue to build games for the 3 classes of devices that are out there: The classic iPhone and the iPhone 3G in one category (from a performance standpoint), the iPod Touch in another category, and the 3GS in another category."

The iPhone 3GS launches on June 19 in the US.