You know, it’s days like this I’m glad I don’t have to go outside to work. Miserably cold, damp and grey. But for me it’s almost a good thing – no glare in my eyes making it hard to see the monitor, no stiflingly hot room once the PSP kit and both PCs have been on for a while.

Most of the performance optimisations have been done now – turns out the horrible slowness was almost entirely down to the big textures, which far exceeded the texture cache the PSP has. So trimming colour depth, dropping the resolution a little, and swizzling the textures have all combined to get us back to a healthy normal frame-rate again. Not the 60fps we get on the PC, but certainly playable. So it’s time to put the optimisation bat back down again, and wade into new features (animation and audio next).

On balance though, the PSP hasn’t really impressed me so far. I realise that hand-helds are supposed to be underpowered, but I just groan whenever I have to try and read something on the low-resolution screen. We haven’t ventured into using UMD for loading yet, but I suspect that would irritate me even more – the load times are already over 10 seconds, and that’s loading a tiny amount of assets. I’d be interested to get our hands on a Nintendo DS for comparison – it’s probably got similar issues, but I’ve got “grass is always greener” issues right now.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 9:40 am and is filed under Tales from the grind-stone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.