Question about how mobile devices handle game resolution?

[futurefields]

I notice a lot of the new tablets have insanely high resolutions like 2560 x 1600 on an 8 inch screen.

Does that mean games will render at that resolution natively? And if so, doesnt that put a huge drain on performance?

Is there a way to have games render at a lesser resolution to improve performance and battery life?

 

[Zodiark1593]

Most mobile games utilize tile based rendering which greatly reduces memory bandwidth needed (a major weakness in mobile systems), bandwidth is still tight but as long as the pixel fillrate is there, the only other bottleneck would be shader power (the more pixels being shaded, the more shader power needed).

For reference, we are at about the 200 Gflop mark for flagship mobile devices which is within the mark of the PS3 and Xbox 360 consoles. We won't see that sort of graphics just yet due to other limitations, but in 2 years time, we'll have crossed that mark.

 

[futurefields]

Yeah but what im wondering is like say GTA 3 on mobile

if you play it on an 8" tablet with 2560x1600 resolution screen

is the game going to natively render at 2560x1600 resolution?

or will it render at a lower resolution like 1080p?

 

[Zodiark1593]

In that case, it really depends on the developer. A dev may choose to simply use native resolution (the most commom choice), a dev may choose a maximum resolution that can be rendered in that game, or the dev can give the choice to the player or even have it set automatically depending on framerate.

Typically, save for the most demanding of games, a developer will likely choose to render to native resolution.

Via root, you can also force whatever resolution you see fit. However, modern mobile GPUs (high end stuff) have a pretty absurd fillrate to cope with these high res displays. In my experiments, there was not much difference in framerate between 1280 x 720 and 1920 x 1080, even though the latter is twice the number of pixels.