Id Software
co-founder John Carmack said Sony’s NGP was in an entirely different class than smartphones for gaming. The hardware would be a “generation beyond” in performance even next to phones that shipped with performance similar to the quad-core processor and graphics that aren’t yet on any other device. Sony will have the advantage of low-level programming standards that will help any game run faster than it would if it had to use a higher level standard, like OpenGL.
Officially, Sony has said the NGP’s visual quality approaches that of a PS3, which no mobile devices can match so far. Many of the technology demos shown at the Tokyo PlayStation event on Thursday were ports of PS3 in-game cutscenes or sequences, like Metal Gear Solid 4.
Carmack has often been a bellwether for mobile gaming and usually gives the nod to Apple for being the performance leader. The Wolfenstein and Quake developer’s experience in writing game code, especially graphics engines, has often led him to choose iOS over Android and other competing platforms when exploring handheld gaming.
