MGF 2008: AMD and Nvidia go head-to-head

We're still at Mobile Games Forum, and the latest session focuses on hardware acceleration, with two panellists: Oscar Clark from Nvidia, and Jani Karlsson from AMD. They're two of the biggest 3D chipset makers (the companies, I mean – Oscar and Jani don't spend their days with a soldering iron in hand), and both are focusing more attention on mobile.

So, will 2008 be the year for mobile 3D?

"I hate the term 3D," says Karlsson. "It's not just 3D. It's also vector graphics acceleration... It's about the visuals. 2008 and 2009 are inevitably going to be the years of visual acceleration in the mobile field. No question about it."

Then it's time for Clark to reply.

"To date, every mobile phone we've had has been the visual equivalent of DOS, and we're waiting for the visual equivalent of Windows to arrive. And we're about to enter that era," he enthuses. "It's about the visuals, the power capacity that it delivers, and about thrilling people on a day-to-day basis with their handset's capabilities."

Give us some figures! If games get prettier, but cost more to make, will people buy more of them?

Karlsson says they will.

"The pickup of games in the US and the prices charged absolutely justified this investment," he says, referring to the 3D BREW games launched in the US.

Clark talks about the first PlayStation, when games industry revenues multiplied tenfold. "Give customers an experience they want, and lo and behold, they buy stuff," he says.

Clark used to work at mobile operator 3, and he says 3D games generated 4.5 times the revenue of normal mobile games. He also says that pricing is a factor, implying that operators can charge MORE than £5 for a really rich 3D game.

This goes against some of the discussions earlier on about mobile games needing to become more affordable though.

"We need to break out of the current model, where mobile games are just seen as casual experiences," says Clark. "They need to become rich, rewarding, gorgeous experiences comparable to other platforms. BUT, they need to be designed for mobile."

Karlsson agrees, saying Java games are becoming "a total commodity", with hundreds of them on the operator portals, and the industry looking at giving games away for free, funded by ads.

Clark chips in (ho ho), saying that mobile gamers who buy high-end games will buy lots of them – if they're provided with enough rich, rewarding titles.

Moderator Kristian Segerstrale asks whether computing power is the be-all and end-all though, citing the way DS has outsold PSP. "Do we really need all that computing power?" he asks.

Karlsson says it's all about quality of experience.

"It's not just visual experience it's several things. What DS has capitalised on the other areas – the form factor is great, the games are specifically designed to work with that control method."

Clark also uses a Nintendo analogy.

"It's as much about battery life as it is about using the microphone to blow out candles and so on on the DS. Nintendo has focused on their strengths, and maximising the customer's pleasure," he reckons.

Clark then goes on to talk about the iPhone and the Nokia N95, dissing the N95 for its poor battery life, sluggish performance, and other technical issues.

The iPhone, by contrast (he says) offers a beautiful user experience, despite being technically inferior to the N95 on several fronts.

"The drive now will be to learn the lessons from what Apple has done, while maximising the battery life and visual performance," he says. "We're entering the visual computing era, where we'll break down the barriers between the network and the handset."

So what are Nvidia and AMD's views on the evolution of handsets?

Karlsson (who used to work at Nokia) says,

"The argument we had with the technology platform guys was, Can you give us a business reason to justify hardware acceleration?" "Now we're entering the iPhone era, where graphical UIs are an intrinsic part of handsets, even for things like GPS, which is graphics-intensive... There is a paradigm shift, and it's absolutely something which requires hardware acceleration."

Clark also refers to the iPhone, saying it's "changed everyone's opinion about how a phone should operate". He thinks it doesn't go far enough though, because you still have to come back to the home screen to do anything else.

"You have to make sure people can go vertically or horizontally from any place to another," he says. "And that involves having a visual experience that lets you move between applications seamlessly, AND to run them all simultaneously."

I think I know what he's getting at: the fact that people are going to have 'do-everything' handsets that need several visually-intensive applications running at once, flipping between them, means they'll need hardware-acceleration inside.

And that in turn provides opportunities for whizzy 3D games, because the tech will be in all these phones. That's my layman's summary, anyway.

"You need these capabilities, whether it's in our devices, in AMD's devices, or in TI's," says Clark.

Both Karlsson and Clark also agree TV-out features on handsets are important - by the way. That discussion didn't really go anywhere, but Clark says Nvidia will have some announcements about TV-out stuff next month at the Mobile World Congress show.

Paul Maglione, boss of Vivendi Games Mobile, is in the audience, and is asked for his view.

"It matters greatly, in terms of widening the experience of mobile gaming," he says. "But then inevitably it ties back to are the commercial and billing systems in place to make this all work. We all know that aside from N-Gage, there aren't high enough price points in Europe to justify it [hardware accelerated games]. So the ecosystem is lagging behind the technical capabilities, and until it catches up, it's a challenging possibility for me as a publisher."

Moderator Segerstrale asks if this means we'll see mobile World Of Warcraft. "Mobile aspects will become part of all MMOs," chuckles Maglione, giving nothing away.