At the beginning of this week, Macscoop made a sensation with its discovery that iTunes code includes references to Apple TV dedicated games. And indeed we kind of wonder to what extent this was really a blunder, and not some clever way to create hype about it a a time when no much exciting news is coming from Cuppertino.
But let's get back to where we were...
As far as we know, the Apple TV features:
- A Pentium M CPU running around 1GHz.
- A GO 7300 Geforce video card with 64MB cache and Turbocache.
- 512 MB RAM.
While that's not quite what you get in a XBox 360, a PS3, or even a MacBook, you can still get someting interesting with it as a TV device.
With a 1280x720 maximum resolution (the native resolution of a MacBook is 1280x800), the Apple TV is well within the Geforce Go 7300's limits and should indeed be able to display some nice and smooth 3D animations.
The bottleneck is to be looked on the side of the CPU, which probably won't run above 1.2 GHz. But well, that's already significant enough, right?
For sure that's not the kind of machine that will run games based on Doom 3's rendering engine, but then again that's not Apple's goal anyway. On the other hand, rendering engines from former generations will be perfectly at ease.
One thing is still to be know: what of the remote? Right, the Apple TV comes with an Apple Remote but... unless that's Arkanoid you want to play (and still...) it's far from being an acceptable solution for gaming. Our idea is that the guys from Apple are preparing some other kind of remote, about which we know nothing for the moment and can only guess that it won't use the infrared port, but instead some USB dongle to be added separately.
So one thing is sure: the Apple TV won't ship "ready-for-gaming" and you'll surely have to purchase some interfaces separately...

[translation by Greg]