There has been a lot of rumors on the net lately about the coming iPad 2 will get a iPhone like (resolution) display. It would have a res of 2048 x 1576 pixels.
Here is one possible "negative" side effect of having this hi-res display.
The memory needed to "feed" a display like this is enormous! 2048 x 1576 x 4 bytes for a 32 bit color depth. That is 12.910.592 bytes just for a single frame buffer. Double that for a double buffering routine. Then all textures that would need to be scaled up to not look blurred on this hires display. Say 3-4 4096x4096 32bit textures... thats close to 270MB just for textures for a potential graphics rich game. IF the game is gonna take full advantage of the nice display. If game developers keep using smaller textures, the games will look blurred and not very good.
The download size for games will grow a lot! And there would be a need for a lot more memory in a iPad 2 and the cost of it will go up. The 20MB file size limit on download over 3G would be very hard to keep new iPad 2 games under.
Here is one possible "negative" side effect of having this hi-res display.
The memory needed to "feed" a display like this is enormous! 2048 x 1576 x 4 bytes for a 32 bit color depth. That is 12.910.592 bytes just for a single frame buffer. Double that for a double buffering routine. Then all textures that would need to be scaled up to not look blurred on this hires display. Say 3-4 4096x4096 32bit textures... thats close to 270MB just for textures for a potential graphics rich game. IF the game is gonna take full advantage of the nice display. If game developers keep using smaller textures, the games will look blurred and not very good.
The download size for games will grow a lot! And there would be a need for a lot more memory in a iPad 2 and the cost of it will go up. The 20MB file size limit on download over 3G would be very hard to keep new iPad 2 games under.