Distinctive Developments have build a 3D animation that displays a few charachters (animated) in a 3D room with the camera moving around the scene to test the iPhone 3G S graphics performance VS that of the Nexus One.
Both the GPU and CPU on each device is tested. The GPU gets it’s stress test from the number of polygons present in the scene while the CPU handles the bone and skinning in the animation. The iPhone 3G S looks to be the superior model here reaching speeds of up to 61 frames per second vs the Nexus One that achieves 30 – 35 frames per second.
It looks like the iPhone 3G S wins completely with almost double the frame rate although a reason for this could be the number of pixels the Nexus One has compared to the iPhone. DD report that the GPU on the Nexus One has to fill 2.5X the amount of pixels that the 3G S does.
The conclusion is that the Nexus is primarily GPU fill-rate limited and the lack of access to the Neon float-point instructions means the CPU is only just keeping pace with the fill-rate.
We would therefore strongly advise the Android team at Google to update the NDK to a new version of GCC so Neon floating-point code can be written to take full advantage of the CPU in the Driod & Nexus. It may only be used by a handful of developers but it is these developers that will push the boundaries of Android games development and show what the platform can do.
Lets hope that Google [GOOG] listen to the advice and update the necessary code to allow some amazing 3D graphics to arrive on the Android. It’s a shame it has a restriction although hopefully not for long now.
How is it set up in terms of resolution? Full on both? If so it´s a test of nothing, because as you know, its twice as many pixels on N1.