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If you were to tell any of your fellow geeks that the second generation iPod touch is faster than Apple’s very own iPhone, they would probably point at you and laugh. However, that statement may be extremely believable based on some numbers and information from Handheld Games Corp.’s CEO Thomas Fessler. Their game, TouchSports Tennis, may be the perfect example of this performance difference, too. Since this tennis game requires impressive 3D rendering, Handheld Games has had to specifically optimize its performance for the different Apple products on which it runs. However, they are now saying that the iPod touch second generation has allowed them to keep the most complex graphics, with two 1,500 polygon tennis players with 32 bones each compared to the iPod touch first generation’s and iPhone’s 800 polygon players.

The main reason for this performance boost on the iPod touch 2G compared to the first gen—as well as both generations of the iPhone—is the fact that it runs on a 532MHz processor compared to 412MHz like the other models. However, Gessler feels there may be other factors playing a role in this, such as tweaked GPU speeds across models. Based on their research, they have found the perfomance from the products to be as follows, from best to worst:

1. iPod touch 2nd Generation
2. iPhone 3G
3. iPhone (original)
4. iPod touch 1st Generation

Although the performance across all models is pretty impressive, it’s interesting to see some specific research coming out from some developers pointed out their differences.

Via [TouchArcade]