Windows Phone 7 Series Shacks up With AMD, Will Bring 480x800 Xbox Live Titles

From DailyTech: Mobile gaming was long dominated by Nintendo with Sony coming in a distant second. That was until Apple stormed onto the scene with its iPhone and stole the show. Today the iPhone is arguably mobile gaming's most influential platform.

Microsoft hopes to steal Apple's thunder when it releases Windows Phone 7 Series phones later this year. Microsoft is offering developers two screen resolutions -- a 480×800 (WVGA) display resolution and a 320×480 (HVGA). The HVGA resolution will come post-launch as an update. Developers can pick which resolution to run, and Microsoft is dictating that its handset partners use dedicated scaling hardware to prevent GPU resources from being gobbled up and to provide better quality scaling. Touch input will automatically scale with whatever resolution you pick.

For example, if a user with a WVGA phone fires up a HVGA iPhone port on a Windows Phone 7 Series phone with a high resolution screen, the hardware will seamlessly scale the game up. This allows game developers flexibility and potentially better performance. Describes Hargreaves, "480×800 is a lot of pixels! This is a great resolution for displaying text, browsing the web, etc, but it can be a challenge for intensive 3D games to render so much data at a good framerate. To boost performance, some games may prefer to render at a lower resolution, then scale up to fill the display."This week Microsoft shared some details about what gaming on the new operating system will look like.

Unlike the Zune and Courier prototype, which are both powered by NVIDIA's Tegra, most Windows Phone 7 Series phones will use a Qualcomm SnapDragon chipset that contains a GPU from NVIDIA-rival AMD. The GPU, the AMD Z430, features a unified pixel & vertex shader pipeline (based on the Xbox 360 Xenos GPU).

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