The latest in iPhone news (and I know there’s been a lot of it this month) comes from id Software. You may know them as the creators of games like Doom and Wolfenstein and the upcoming Rage. iPhone users will be getting introduced to, or reacquainted with, id over the next year.

id co-founder John Carmack told Joystiq today that he is “passionate about the benefits of the iPhone,” and that his company has a lot of fun porting their titles. He also says it doesn’t require a lot of focus, at least for an established IP like Doom. But there is more to come from Carmack and company, who recently announced their buyout by ZeniMax, parent company to Bethesda.

“I’ve got a slate of iPhone titles, I expect to have an iPhone release every two or three months for the next year,” said Carmack. He made it clear that the benefit isn’t necessarily the money, but rather the level of commitment. When a game doesn’t cost millions of dollars to make and market, it’s a lot less pressure on the development team, which Carmack views as a good thing.

I’m glad to see a major developer taking the iPhone into serious consideration. Titles like Myst have recently been ported as well, but how about some new IP? Personally, I’d love some.

Hailed (by Apple) as the fastest iPhone ever made, a lot of attention has been paid to the new processor and RAM specs in the iPhone 3GS. Those new specs will certainly translate to a faster phone, but most likely marginally so, noticeable only within apps that do a lot of algorithm munching. What’s likely to be truly impressive on the 3GS is the new graphical capabilities that come from the Power-VR SGX GPU inside the phone.

Hubert at Ubergizmo, who used to program for Nvidia, gave a quick breakdown of the improvements we could see in iPhone gaming, and they’re pretty damn impressive. As the article notes, the new GPU offers improvements in two traditional aspects of development. First, it allows more triangle processing per second, and second, it gives a serious boost to the number of pixels that can be modified per second.

More than the hardware, though, is the options the new GPU will offer developers. The new chip gives coders access to some of the same principles used when developing games for the Xbox 360 or the PS3. Haven’t seen many shadows on the iPhone? They’re coming. So is bump mapping, normal mapping, light mapping, and multi-textures, making it possible to render complex 3D environments with an unprecedented sense of realism.

While people complained that this iPhone release was an evolution rather than a revolution, the changes to the GPU will be revolutionary for the hand-held device, making gaming the real breakout feature of the 3GS. I was unimpressed by the game demos at WWDC. Hopefully that wil change when developers have had their new kit for a few months.

Source: Ubergizmo

Now that Resident Evil: Degeneration is out, we’ve all been wondering what comes next from Capcom. Of course, we’ve also seen smaller (but not less important, damn it!) titles from them, like Mega Man 2 with its god awful control system. The games have been a big success, with RE:Degeneration set to hit a million units before year’s end.

So for the next fiscal year, Capcom plans to keep the love a-comin’ with ‘more than 10’ new games by the end of March 2010. When serious players like Capcom throw their weight behind a device, I like to pay attention. Hopefully this will mean better games just as much as it means more.

Source: Reuters