Playstation Vita Review

The gaming community has made its choice; mobile gaming is now a significant slice of the multi-billion dollar industry.  While “hardcore” gamers snicker at the proposal of serious gaming on iPads and mobile phones, the game publishers are making a serious new stream of income.

The Sony Playstation Vita (Latin for “Life”) is a new handheld console that blends the classic gameplay of traditional consoles with new technologies offered by tablets and mobile phones.  The handhelds more features than any single console today, so it can play traditionally-controlled games, as well as games that benefit from touch and movement.

Specifications

The Playstation Vita is currently the most powerful handheld gaming device ever created.  The handheld uses two quad-core processors, the main processor being an ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore.  Three of the four cores are usable for applications.  The second is a quad-core GPU SGX543MP4+ designed by PowerVR, which is a 4-core version of the GPUs used in the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S.  The GPU is based on 65nm technology and has a fillrate of 35 MTriangles/s per core with a 1000 MPixel/s fill rate per core and is DirectX 9 and OpenGL 2.1 capable.  The GPU also has a clock speed of 200Mhz per core (800Mhz in total).

The system has 512MB of system memory, which is twice that of the Playstation 3.  This additional memory is what allows cross-game chat and the ability to load several programs at once.  The video chip has access to 128MB of video RAM.

Next we take a look at the outside…