iPhone 3G S visuals to surpass PSP's

Makes sense to have settings for 'extra high graphics'.

Fishlabs, a mobile game developer whose titles include the visually impressive Galaxy on Fire for iPhone, has revealed that the OpenGL 2.0 support for iPhone 3G S will enable the platform to surpass PSP visuals.

"The OpenGL 2.0 support will push the iPhone beyond PSP," Fishlabs boss Michael Schade told PocketGamer.

It's not something we'll see across the board though, especially not in low budget titles.

"As graphic assets need to be designed from scratch to benefit from 2.0 shaders it will be very hard to monetize the extra effort in the early days," he said. "It's definitely not worth it for $0.99 apps."

Schade also expressed his pleasure that the new iPhone has improved battery life and increased speed up there with the second-gen iPod touch, although does feel this will lead to a fragmentation of users.

"It makes more sense now to have a setting for extra high graphics to run on iPod touch 2 and iPhone 3G S, even if that means more dev efforts and testing," explained Schade. "It creates some fragmentation but we can still support all devices with just one SKU that detects automatically what device it's running on, and switches to the best graphics automatically."