[McG]

AMD's next-gen GPU powers Crysis on an iPhone

AMD unveiled its next-gen GPU, and secretive networked gaming company OTOY used it to power a demo of Crysis running on an iPhone. Believe it or not, it really worked. OTOY's demo of Crysis running on an iPhone was probably the most profoundly intriguing use of AMD's upcoming GPU that I saw all evening. First, the game is rendered like normal on the server machine, where frames from it are grabbed by the OTOY server-side software. Next, these frames are compressed and sent out over the network to the client, which decompresses them using a very small chunk of code (about 780K, hence the iPhone demo) and displays them in a window. User input is sent back to the server over UDP because it's tolerant of packet loss, so you don't add to latency by resending dropped packets.

The demos of Bioshock, Grand Theft Auto, and World of Warcraft were surprisingly responsive, despite the fact that the games were being served up by machines in Los Angeles. The iPhone's screen was small enough that I couldn't discern any compression artifacts, and the gameplay was smooth and responsive. Aside from the half-baked control scheme, which was apparently hacked together at the last minute, this really was Crysis running on an iPhone.