Cell Phones to Get Computer Graphics Power

L A S &nbsp V E G A S, Jan. 12 -- One of the biggest problems with playing games on your cell phone is performance. Sure the screen is tiny, but the ultra-low-power technology that drives it can't seem to produce smooth animation, let alone smooth 3D graphics.

ATI's new Imageon 2300 chip hopes to change all that with a full-featured integrated 3D engine.

The 3D part of the chip is based on some of the technology from the last of the old Rage series of desktop 3D graphics and some of the early Radeon tech, tweaked and shrunk down to cell phone size. There's enough integrated frame buffer in the chip for double-buffered 320x240 displays — enough for modern cell phones — and this can be supplemented by up to 2MB of off-die memory integrated into the chip package.

In terms of 3D features, the chip will do full geometry processing up to 1 million triangles per second, texture combining, perspective correction, and Mip-mapping, bilinear and trilinear filtering, dithering, and alpha blending.

A demonstration of a cell phone development unit running videogame MotoGP at the Consumer Electronic Show was particularly impressive, with good image quality and a frame rate of perhaps 20 frames per second. The same game running in typical software rendering mode was quite ugly and so slow it would be unplayable. At 100MHz, the maximum expected chip performance, it delivers a 100 megapixels fill rate. That's one pixel pipeline with one texture unit.

The chip is loaded with 2D features as well, like an MPEG4 decoder with iDCT engine and motion compensation and a JPEG encoder/decoder that can encode JPEG images at speed of up to 30 frames per second. It supports resolutions up to 2 megapixels, as does the video capture port, so the chip is ready for new cell phones that take high-resolution pictures and video.

The power consumption seems quite reasonable for all this technology. In normal cell use you can expect about 20mW, but that can spike up to 70mW when running a full-bore 3D game. This is high, but not as bad as trying to run 3D games entirely on the host CPU.