Nokia plans to release 3D accelerated N-Gage Games

I reported about the lack of 3D acceleration in N-Gage games. A real shame, because devices like the N95 are so much more powerful: They can display amazing graphics, much better ones than normal devices.

Now there are very interesting new from the N-Gage Blog:

In a talk this afternoon, Nokia’s Peter Lykke Nielsen — with an assist from the guys at Digital Legends Entertainment — showed interested game developers how the OpenGL ES 1.1 standard will be incorporated into the N-Gage Software Development Kit (SDK) in the near future. Nielsen is the product manager of the N-Gage SDK.

As many of our more technical-savvy readers already know, a number of N-Gage compatible devices that are also OpenGL ES 1.1 compliant are already in the market. The good news is that Nokia plans to offer hardware-acceleration of select N-Gage games going forward, as well as a software rendered version for those devices that lack hardware acceleration.

The bad news is that I can’t tell you which games will feature 3D hardware support or when they will be available. But considering we were shown a sweet-looking demo of ONE running under OpenGL and that the Digital Legends team gave an overview of their experience developing, one can probably draw one’s own conclusions about at least one game.

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That’s really great news, just have a look at the 3D accelerated “ONE” version:

It looks awesome and much better than the normal version. Hopefully we will see as many 3D accelerated N-Gage game versions as soon as possible.