AppleInsider has a news story today about a recent interview given by Epic Games developer Tim Sweeney to Gizmodo. Sweeney was one of the main developers of Epic’s Unreal Engine, which powered such incredible console games as BioShock, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and Unreal, of course, and iOS game Infinity Blade, so he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to graphics, processing power and all that kind of good stuff. In the interview, Sweeney says that the iPad 2 has made a massive leap forward in performance from the first iPad. He says that whereas consoles usually make a 10-20x leap in performance every 7-8 years, the iPad 2 has made a 9x improvement in graphics performance in just one year. To put that in some sort of context, Sweeney explains that the original iPad’s A4 CPU is basically comparable to a single Xbox 360 core, which is pretty impressive in itself, but the new A5 chip inside the iPad 2 has “far, far more potential.†He goes on to illustrate just how much power he’s talking about by saying that so powerful is the iPad 2’s shader performance, it would be able to use the same high-detail shaders used by Epic in Xbox 360 game Gears of War. He also says that the iPad 2’s 512MB of RAM is in no way a drawback, as it’s the same as the Xbox 360.
Source: AppleInsider | Epic game developer calls iPad 2 graphics leap "astonishing," doubts Android can compete
