> It's interesting to see people who think their phone somehow equals the abilities of a console or PC.
I don't know of anyone who thinks that, and I don't read the above post that way. It's almost a pointless discussion, though, because the three year old phone in my pocket is more powerful than most of the desktop computers I've owned in my life. It doesn't seem unreasonable to expect mobile devices a couple of cycles hence to be able to match 90% of what's on people's desks right now.
Well, I took it that when someone says they want to play Crysis on their phone they mean they want to play Crysis on their phone. If he was speaking about a phone in the future then I see your point.
I don't think it's unreasonable either. I would agree that to compare today's tech with yesterday's or today's with tomorrow's is sometimes pointless. I didn't realize that's what we were doing.
There aren't any mobile GPUs that support cuda-style parallel programming yet. Even if a phone did launch with 4 stream processors/cuda cores it would still need another 1300 cores before it could compete with my desktop graphics card in terms of power.
I think one big reason we're seeing comparable graphics on mobile devices now is that they are just now getting close to the capabilities of the 5 year old console hardware. Most dev studios need to target this old hardware and make their games scale to it.
When the new consoles come out the gulf between mobile and console gaming will again be huge and the consoles will immediately begin to lag behind PC hardware as usual.
Maybe game companies will continue to make an effort to scale their engines to mobile hardware as well but I doubt it as the architecture is fundamentally shifting to make use of massive parallelism.
I don't know of anyone who thinks that, and I don't read the above post that way. It's almost a pointless discussion, though, because the three year old phone in my pocket is more powerful than most of the desktop computers I've owned in my life. It doesn't seem unreasonable to expect mobile devices a couple of cycles hence to be able to match 90% of what's on people's desks right now.