Epic Games' Tim Sweeney comments on the situation of mobile gaming

In an extensive interview with Gizmodo, Tim Sweeney spoke a little about his impressions of today's mobile platforms in relation to games. Nothing more suitable, since he is one of the developers ahead of Unreal Engine, created by Epic Games and employed in many successful games, including Infinity Blade, for iOS.

Infinity Blade on iPad 2

One of the first highlights of mobile gadgets has been their speed of evolution: while traditional consoles have experienced a gain of 1020 times every 78 years, a device like the iPad has jumped 9 times in graphics performance only in its first annual renewal. . The current generation of the tablet would already be able to use the same shaders employed in Gears of War, inclusive.

Comparing the hardware present in gadgets with that of a console, the A4 chip would be roughly the equivalent of a processing core of an Xbox 360 (which has three running at 3.2GHz), while the A5 would keep in itself “much, much more potential of what we explore today ”. One of the ways to start moving forward in this regard would be by optimizing the OpenGL | ES graphics drivers, which currently provide a fantastic look to games, but do not allow the display of many objects simultaneously.

However, the hardware stability of a platform already makes life for game developers immensely high-end. This would be one of the main reasons why Epic has not yet ventured on Android, given that on several gadgets with the Google mobile system, apps need to compete for the available memory with software installed by operators, not to mention hardware variations.

Oh, and one more detail about hardware and memory: the iPad 2 and iPhone 4, apparently, have the same amount of RAM as an Xbox 360. I still didn't know that, did you? For Sweeney, this value is more than enough to know how much memory is available would be much worse for a developer than having a small but certain amount.

The solution to this problem on Android would be relatively simple: “Google has to be more evil. He needs to be a lot more controlling. ” At l, Epic's focus will be iOS, as “really the best platform to profit”.

(via AppleInsider)