Windows Phone 7 Series supports DirectX 9 and SM3
A slide from a presentation about XNA at South by Southwest reveals the details about the GPU.
As you’d expect for a smartphone, the CPU uses the ARM architecture, specifically the ARMv7. More interesting is the GPU. Microsoft is promising high levels of integration between Windows Phone 7 Series devices and the Xbox 360, but it's surprising just how much power Microsoft wants its new mobile phone to have. At MIX 10, a presentation showing details of the phone listed the GPU as providing ‘DirectX 9 acceleration’, while at South by Southwest (SXSW), in an XNA presentation, the phone’s GPU was claimed to support Shader Model 3.
The presence of SM3 would imply it’s DX9.0c the phone supports - meaning the GPU supports the same kind of features first popularised by PC GPUs such as the GeForce 6800, including HDR lighting and high levels of precision throughout the pipeline. While DirectX 10 and 11 are starting to appear in some new games, the vast majority still target DX9.0c, meaning that we could be seeing mobile games that are on a technical par with PC and console titles.
It seems hard to believe – the SXSW presentation gave the screen resolution as 800 x 480, which might be lower than that of a typical desktop or laptop, but it's hardly an insignificant amount of work for a GPU, especially when it’s running from a battery. More likely, the similarity of the mobile GPU with existing PC GPUs will make it easier to port code written for the Xbox 360 and PC to mobile devices, as well as meaning developers won’t have to learn a new graphics architecture to make a mobile game.
The SXSW presentation also shed a little more light on the level of Xbox 360 integration we can expect from Windows Phone 7 Series devices, with a slide promising shared leaderboards, achievements, gamerscore and Avatar access.
Excited by carrying around a DX9c GPU in your phone, or are you yet to be convinced by the idea of mobile gaming? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyThe proposed 800x480 WVGA resolution is already in use on some smartphones such as Sony Ericsson's Xperia series and in the case of the X1 and X2 the 528MHz ARM CPU of the device barely has the grunt to drive the WinMo 6.5 desktop at that resolution or play back the device's own recorded videos, nevermind render games with DX9 features!
I think Microsoft may be making devices for Phone 7 prohibitively expensive to both manufacture and buy to capture the kind of pricepoint they'll need to compete with Android and the iPhone.
All these efforts to tidy up the WinMo platform for this iteration of the OS are a step in the right direction, but I can't help but think that the decisions have been heavyhanded in places and 'too little, too late' overall.
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Ooh! 1000th post!
looks like my personal career target will be ARM or Imagine tech.
Ah yes, i see it now " NVIDIA, the Way it's Meant to be Text"
Right, i shall get my coat....
Sam
lol.
the nVidia chip you speak of is Tegra, i don't believe it supports DirectX, only OpenGL ES.
A cell phone with absolutely no lag in the interface and functions would be amazing, and I'm sure it'll be flashy etc.
I'd be down if someone released one with a hardware keyboard..
I can understand why they would use the Tegra. As it currently powers the Zune. Or maybe the tegra 2 as it will be out later this year if I recall correctly.
Kudos to Microsoft for pushing the envelope yet again which I'm sure the rest will follow as always.
Yup and with the 1ghz Snapdragon it's damn snappy and fine on winmo 6.5. Lovely phone, shame most likely it won't run WP7 as that needs dx9 graphics accelleration.
EDIT: I see that the article hints at battery life toward the end, but I thought it was worthy of further discussion, since it's a pretty important feature in the hand-held market.
Who needs 360 support on their phone? Just another iphone, nothing new, just repackaged (at least there will be models with a physical keyboard.)
And I was beginning to lose hope..
woo! \o/ yay!