N-gage To Support 3D Hardware Accelerated Games

To the present date, N-Gage game developers had been limited by Nokia in their ability to develop 3D-accelerated games, in an attempt to maintain compatibility across all the range of N-Gage supported phones, which includes largely dissimilar devices. But this seems bound to change.

Nokia started a site (http://ngage.uservoice.com), through which, users of the N-Gage service could make themselves heard by making suggestions or supporting other members.

Time went by and the majority of N-Gage users continued to show their support for this feature, until last week, an announcement was made by an official spokesperson in the site, that the suggestion had been accepted and 3D acceleration support, including OpenGL ES 1.1, would be included in the next version of the N-Gage SDK.

Although there will be some learning to do, the inclusion of 3D hardware acceleration into the next version of the N-Gage Software Development Kit (SDK) provides developers a reduction in the time and effort required to develop 3D games for the S60 platform.

This should mean that in a not-so-far future, we should be getting a breakthrough in graphics quality, by games making use of the full potential of phones powered by Texas Instruments' 3D-accelerated OMAP 2420 chipset (N93, N93i, N95, N958Gb and N82), and Nokia devices freaturing any future OpenGL ES compliant hardware.

As much as I'm happy to hear about this, i think it would be in Nokia's best interest to encourage developers to create 2 versions of games. A regular version, and an enhanced version for 3D accelerated devices.