iPad 2 to gain double-res display - but not until 2012 Another day, another iPad 3 rumour, this time that while the gadget will indeed sport a display with a higher resolution than the iPad 2 has, other specs will not change. According to analyst Craig Berger of US investment house FBR Capital Markets, what World+Dog is calling the 'iPad 3' will in fact be the 'iPad 2 Plus'. That …
It'll be interesting to see what happens if this goes ahead - doubling the dimensions quadruples the number of on-screen pixels, and at 1536 x 2048, you're starting to get to the point where even high-end PCs with their dedicated GPUs can feel a little strained.
F'instance, a quick look at Tom's Hardware shows that a budget-level GPU such as the Radeon 5570 struggled to push out 30fps at 1920*1200 (2.3 million pixels vs the 3.1 million pixels of the rumoured iPad 3 display). And that's despite the fact that it's backed by 512mb of dedicated RAM, paired with a 4-core 3ghz CPU and has a far higher power budget than a mobile device could ever hope to have - during playing sessions, the GPU alone drew 53 watts.
All told, the iPad 3 may well have a double-res display, but (much as with the Xbox 360), I wouldn't be surprised if it also included a hardware upscaler, so that games can be rendered at 1024*768 and then given some "free" anti aliasing via the upscaler...
Not sure who makes mobile low power GPU (or apps processor with GPU) that can actually run that display. Nobody at the moment I would suspect. Note I said low power. I've sure some can do it at the expense of short battery life.
More to the point - why bother? My desktop monitor has a lower resolution than that. 1080p video needs at most, er, 1080 vertical pixels. Whilst the retina display on the iPhone looks great, I'm not sure the benefits (looks nice) outweigh the drawbacks (see above) on a tablet device.
Brilliant, perhaps this will lead the world away from the circa 1990 style 1920x1200 spec video we've been forced to suffer all these years. If they get 1536 x 2048 out as a common format (plus the wide screen version with even more lovely dots on) then maybe the suppliers of monitors will be embarrassed into joining in.
I first worked on 1920x1200 res screens on Sony's Unix workstation in 90 or 91. Which is 20 years ago, so some progress would be nice. My 2003 Dull laptop was 1920x1200 and 150dpi. A move to more dots is long long over due.
What's wrong with 1920x1200? What do you want, 1920x1080, which is the new widescreen standard? It has even fewer pixels!
I started working with 4:3 monitors, then I could not find any. Move to 16:10. Now, they are all 16:9. I don't watch movies on my PC, why do I have to use a widescreen monitor?
Maybe what you want is a higher resolution. That's fine, but higher res monitors are here already, and have been for some time. They are not affordable, because mass production now is 1920x1080.
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