New iPad thread

[Roman Budzowski]

Hi
Did you see it? Did you touch it? I just "read" live review of presentation. I am happy that they didn't change that much... glad that the resolution is exactly 2x bigger. But with new resolution I feel like 2d games are going to be way more expensive and out of indie budget

cheers
Roman

[Applewood]

meh, what a balls up.

It's hard to imagine why I need such a massive resolution on such a small screen. About it's only purpose seems to be to drop frame rates as, predictably, the GPU has not scaled with the extra pixels.

And apparently it has a better camera. Because you see people taking videos with their iPad all the time, right?

All this new machine has achieved is to muddy the waters.

[Desktop Gaming]

It's hard to imagine why I need such a massive resolution on such a small screen.

+1.

And apparently it has a better camera. Because you see people taking videos with their iPad all the time, right?

No, and the reason why is because the iPad 2's camera is shite. The one megapixel brick-sized digital camera I had 15 years ago was better.

[terin]

I use mine as a phone... cell phone style. Ballin' like a man with a boombox!

[Nutter2000]

It's hard to imagine why I need such a massive resolution on such a small screen.

Because apple are a marketing-lead company who promote style over substance to a rabid fan base who buy everything they put out on ridiculous 6 month cycles to avoid their stupidly high priced tech depreciating in order to fully maximise their profits while at the same time maintaining the fresh "cool factor" of their products?

Oh wait... you wanted a logical reason? ;-)

[Roman Budzowski]

I expect it to be especially great for watching photos. If I can see a difference on real photos (from pictures taken with different resolution cameras) then why not on iPad. For 3D games it can't hurt, for reading too (though I don't think it's so much required).

Personally speaking, I didn't believe they will be able to squeeze so many pixels in that screen.

[gamer247]

And I just use my phone. Which fits nicely in my pocket.

[jcottier]

I've ordered one this morning. I am using my old iPad1 everyday for playing, reading mails and surfing (and I share it with my wife and kids). The screen resolution will means that web browsing will be massively improved. I don't care that much about the CPU increased speed (I'm only creating & playing 2d/casual games). I'm happy it has some cameras as I'm thinking of porting my webcam games for iPad2 & 3. I don't consider myself an Apple fan, but I can't see the iPad being rule out by any other tablet this year.

JC

[Bad Sector]

It's hard to imagine why I need such a massive resolution on such a small screen.

eBooks. Text looks a lot better on a retina display than the previous one. Apple seems to push eBooks a lot - especially "smart" eBooks that take advantage of iPad's multitouch and 3D features. They even went as far as to write a brand new eBook authoring tool with support for multitouch, 3D display, animations, JavaScript, videos, etc all with a very easy to use user interface (ok, except possibly JS) - and then gave it for free so that anyone can write eBooks for iPad.

They really want to push on that front.

[Grey Alien]

Wait I thought that the GPU was 4x faster so that basically the 2x larger res (4x as many pixels) won't be slower?

Also it'll look brighter than non-retina display.

[JGOware]

meh, what a balls up. It's hard to imagine why I need such a massive resolution on such a small screen.

You really don't. But they know the majority of their customer base can afford to bank roll Apple so why not.

[jcottier]

It's hard to imagine why I need such a massive resolution on such a small screen.

this sentence kind of remind me the 640k that should be enough for everyone
Seriously, I just received my iPad3 5 minutes ago and I can tell you really see the difference with the old ipad when reading any web pages, it is fine extremely fine and your eyes says thanks.
I'm sold.
Now, as a 2D game dev, I won't be supporting that res any time soon. but for 3D, even without changing your art, you'll get automatically a massive visual boost.

JC

[Applewood]

And a halving of the frame rate? We've not been able to get one yet to test on.

[lennard]

http://gamasutra.com/view/news/16611...unch_today.php

Apple is working hard to make sure that the <$200 market doesn't erode their market share. $399 for an iPad II is insane.

When I started out an Apple III disk drive was $1000 of 1981 dollars.

[jcottier]

We've not been able to get one yet to test on.

Can you do a build that activate the retina display on the ipad? if yes, send me a build that also display the frame rates on the screen.
here is my id: ce321f8a3f452be0c6b55a6749f6c8fa9b57d404

JC

[Applewood]

I think you missed the "Not" part. I don't expect to see one here for at least another month - Apple didn't even reply to our request for a developer machine which came with a 0% surprise factor.

We did make someone's top 10 list for iPad3 games though, so I guess it works ok stretching the screen.

(I hope that's a stock photo though as it should be showing the fancy water shader!)

[jcottier]

I'm not following you completly. Retina display for the ipad is the same as the iphone, you don't have to strech the screen. To activate the retina, you basically just need 2 lines of codes (you still think the res is 1024x768 but it is actually doubled, let says it is like you have subpixel, it works on its own, you don't have too change your code). I was just offering you to test your game and tell you what is the frame rate running at 2048x1556.

[Bad Sector]

@jcottier:
I think his (totally valid) concern is that since there are 4x pixels to fill, the shaders will run 4x times and if the GPU isn't 4x faster, there will be slowdown.

[Applewood]

@jc I know it does work that way, but until I update the app it's working how it already has, which assumes a max of iPad 1 size. The screen "stretching" I refer to is exactly the same as putting a desktop res on your PC to 640x480 and going full screen, nothing technical. Thanks for your offer of a test but its moot at the moment, we don't have time to update the HUD elements and GUI stuff even if it would run the 3D view at full size.

You're right bad sector, the stats I heard gives a doubling of the GPU power, which means frame rates will suffer. Not half, but somewhere between half and full I expect.

[JGOware]

this sentence kind of remind me the 640k that should be enough for everyone
Seriously, I just received my iPad3 5 minutes ago and I can tell you really see the difference with the old ipad when reading any web pages, it is fine extremely fine and your eyes says thanks.
I'm sold.JC

This sentence reminds of the gamer geeks who think 200fps is so much smoother on the eyes compared to 60fps.

[JGOware]

hilarious.....

http://gizmodo.com/5894094/we-people...-they-loved-it

[Jamie W]

My 2d game runs at 60fps on an iPad1. I'm guessing if I did a retina iPad3 version, I should still get 60fps out of it. Just a pain to have 3 lots of graphics:

1. Old iPhone (1x)
2. iPhone retina / iPad (2x)
3. iPad retina (4x)

[Applewood]

I should imagine that would hold, yes.

Agree it's a major pita for 2D stuff. Even 3D games have 2D elements like the UI and any HUD stuff. You can't leave them just docked in the corners etc., else they'll physically be too small to tap on. I guess we start doing stuff at monster resolution and scale as we blit - that's fine to a point but someone's losing fidelity somewhere.

[Jamie W]

Yeah. Plus, all these extra 4x graphics are bound to beef up the filesize of your app...

Hmm, I wonder if that has anything to do with Apple increasing the 3G download max filesize to 20mb?

[JGOware]

Can't you guys just use a projection matrix and scale to the device size? That's how we did things in direct x. Logic stays the same, media stays the same, etc.

[CasualInsider]

iOS 5.1 increases OTA download limit to 50 MB from 20.

[jcottier]

Can't you guys just use a projection matrix and scale to the device size? That's how we did things in direct x. Logic stays the same, media stays the same, etc.

It's easier than that. When you ask the resolution on the Retina device, it's doesn't tell you the real res but the old one. So, if you ask what is the resolution on the iPad3, it will reply 1024x768. So, you don't have to change your code whatsoever for 3d and 2d... Everything will be at the right place and right size. But when drawing your triangle/quad with texture (so work for 2d & 3d) the device will actually display 4x as many pixel that you would expect. Like I said previously, it looks like you have subpixel precision. You draw a quad of 20x20 pixel in your code but it is actually 40x40 on the screen. So, if your texture was bigger than before, you'll get better precision, if not you'll have the same texel precision (but still better precision on the triangle edges).

It looks like a weird solution by Apple, but actually it means that everything is back compatible and also means that you can just switch on retina support in your software with 1 line of code and you'll get your app supporting 4x the precision without changing anything. So, really if you have a 3D game it take 2 sec to check if your game runs like a pig or not at that insane res. If it runs like a pig, then don't activate retina display. If it does run fast bingo, all your 3d will look way more precise (your GUI will stay the same as the old ipad res unless you update your art, but I am sure not that many player will notice that you didn't boost your GUI).

JC

[Applewood]

Ah, I didn't see that in the docs - that's an elegant solution.

[Bram]

My game still runs at 60fps with retina enabled on iPad.
MSAA is off though.

And I use non trivial shaders with real time dynamic schadows.

But yeah, if you are fill rate limited on ipad2, then twice the gpu cores will not help for four times the pixels.

[jcottier]

Yes i also saw the new ipad review and after looking at the review i think it is the best tablet available in the market.

A human spam bot? All your post are completely non-informative and your sig link let supposed your definitely one.

JC