Many rumours have been floating around concerning the upcoming March 7 reveal of the iPad3 and its supposed upgrade to a full Retina Display. Pixels on Toast released a run down on how this would make a difference in the devices visual performance and how this may become relevant for game development.

What the inclusion of a Retina Display actually means form a technical standpoint is that the resolution on Apple devices can be doubled, delivering four times as many pixels in total. As a result the iPhone 4′s display featured a 960 x 640 display in comparison to its predecessor’s 480 x 320 resolution. This way the pixellated edges become barely visible at a normal viewing distance.

To demonstrate how this would look like on the iPad, Pixels on Toast created two mock-up screenshots, doubling the pixel count from the iPad and iPad2′s 1024 x 768 to a 2048 x 1536 resolution.

They continue to explain, “Many of the more hand-drawn titles will have pixel-based source art, meaning that unless they were working in high resolution to begin with, there is going to have to be a lot of reworking to fully support the new displays. Titles using 3D graphics will be in a better state of readiness than bitmap games. (…) However, for best results, games developers are going to have to raise the resolutions of their textures, otherwise the 3D models will look smeary, albeit with sharply defined silhouettes.”

If the rumours surrounding the new display turn out to be true, the improved processing power and resolution of the iPad3 will make it a strong contender in the portable gaming market.

Check out the pictures below to see the difference.

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