The iPod touch faster than the iPhone? Who knew? With more and more games being released in the App Store, one developer noticed that its latest game release, TouchSports Tennis, got a noticeable speed boost on the 2nd gen iPod touch. CEO of Handheld Games Thomas Fessler told TouchArcade the following:

Our first step to increase fps performance was to introduce hardware dependent levels of detail. Where we can easily display two 1500 polygon tennis players with 32 bones each on the iPod touch 2G and maintain fast and fluid game play, the original iPod touch just chokes, and in some instances so do the iPhones. To speed up the touch, we reduced the players to 800 polygons in farther away moments of gameplay, and are now using 1000 polygon models for close ups, bringing the original iPod touch game play performance level close to that of the iPhone 3G. We've taken this approach across the board with great results.

The iPod touch got speed boost when the 2nd Generations was released with 532MHz processor from the previous 412MHz. The noticeable speed jump has people wondering what else could be hidden. Below is a video of the load times of TouchSports Tennis on all four devices.

 

The iPhone/iPod touch models rank in the following order in terms of 3D performance:

1. iPod touch 2nd gen.
2. iPhone 3G
3. iPhone
4. iPod touch 1st gen.