The Nexus One surprised many people when it was released with a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and 512MB of memory, but the fact that Google and HTC did not know how to exploit the power of this hardware through Android as they should. A test carried out recently by Distinctive Games proves this very clearly, since the smartphone was well behind the iPhone 3GS in a performance test and 3D graphics performed internally by it.
(youtube) http://www.youtube/watch?v=GYqZK25KU3U (/ youtube)
The company created a complex 3D scenario for the test, with a super detailed environment and support for the insertion of several characters, something that was clearly the CPU and GPU of the smartphones working hard to ensure good quality animations. In processing this scenario, the iPhone 3GS was able to display graphics at 60 frames per second, while the Nexus One barely exceeded 30. A second analysis was made with eight animated characters and reduced the performance of the Apple smartphone to 29 frames per second, but left the Google product with an even lower score (21).
Overall, Distinctive Games believes that the iPhone 3GS 138% faster than the Nexus One in 3D graphics performance. There are several reasons for this, the main one being the fact that the Google smartphone needs to use many more resources to fill more pixels on its screen (whose resolution 800 Ă— 480, 2.5 times higher than the iPhone 3GS). However, the developer recalls that this is not enough to increase the graphics performance of the Nexus, since the hardware and software integration of the iPhone 3GS offers a level of performance that its competitor is unable to achieve.
Apple devices use 600MHz ARM processors with PowerVR SGX graphics, so it's easy for your manufacturer to optimize your mobile system to take full advantage of them. When a developer compiles a game for iPhones / iPods touch, these optimizations are also applied automatically (but can be controlled via the SDK, obviously), so making a certain product behave much more efficiently on Apple's mobile platform in relation to others require little (or almost none) work.
On the other hand, Android does not offer many of these benefits on its system or for Market developers, since its tools for creating native applications still do not support as much graphics acceleration as possible on third-party hardware. There are alternative ways of gaining access to it on Google's mobile platform, but that should be offered by default, as Apple does.
One of the advantages that Apple has always had when creating its products was offering the maximum possible integration between hardware and its systems, so it is clear that it manages to achieve much more advanced results with its gadgets than competing products that appear to offer greater performance. It is even curious, for example, that a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1GHz processor cannot deliver good performance on a common smartphone, while Apple developed the A4 with equal operating frequency to support a tablet with software that can even be ported from desktops.
(via Ars Technica)
