By Many of us are holding out on upgrading to new Android handsets to wait for NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 to eventually hit some of these beasts, and the wait looks to be justified as each and every day roars on. Although the Samsung Galaxy S series of phones have provided the best mobile gaming hardware for Android users, its PowerVR SGX540 GPU apparently won’t hold a candle to what a Tegra 2 phone will provide.
Trendy Entertainment – makers of the game Dungeon Defenders for PSN, Xbox Live Arcade, PC, iOS, and Android – have stated that their game will only be available for “next-gen Android devices using the Tegra 2 GPU.” Right away, it sounds like many developers of high profile games could end up requiring the same amount of juice for some of these titles that will rival console graphics and physics.
Epic’s Mark Rein has expressed interest in bringing Unreal Engine 3 to Android, but last we heard, they were only thinking about it. All of their focus in the mobile phone realm has gone to iOS. That’s understandable considering Android handsets have only just recently began packing GPUs and CPUs beefy enough to handle the type of graphics that an Unreal-based game would present.
It’s believed that it’s much easier to develop 3D games against the Tegra 2 architecture than any other popular architecture for Android, so it’s possible we could see Epic making their wares exclusive to handsets which pack it. The main thing to take away from this story, though, is to remember that your wait for a Tegra 2 device eventually won’t go unappreciated. Hang in there!
[Pocket Gamer via Android & Me]
When are Tegra 2 devices supposed to start shipping?
That’s bull****!!! I don’t see any iOS devices packing the likes of the Tegra2!
We expect to hear about first devices sometime in January, with the first possible round of announcements going out at CES.
This is just a marketing strategy, the tegra 2 gpu scores 30fps in nenamark1 at 1024×600, galaxy s users score 51fps in nenamark1 at 800×480, meaning that we would pretty much score the same 30fps at 1024×600, in other words what i mean is device like the galasy S line, G2/DHD/my touch hd, and up will run the unreal engine 3 perfectly fine, so dont believe there marketing strategy about the tegra 2 gpu, cause its completely and utterly false.
Since the new MT4G doesn’t have the same form factor as the Desire HD, I’ll probably hold out for a tegra 2 android device. It’s a shame because there will always be something better just around the corner no matter how long you hold out LOL.
Geez… couple of months ago my brand new HTC Desire was the superior flagship device, and now there’s already Desire HD, and Tegra 2 devices on the horizon… i’m unwilling to keep up.
I’ve never seen fragmentation to be a problem until now.
The Tegra2 “requirement” is either just lazy coding or an nVidia paycheck.
I believe those devices will be able to run the unreal engine 3 and other beefy engines just fine, but I suppose it ultimately depends on who is making what engine. Epic could very well go a “lazy” route and only support NVIDIA-drafted chipsets and that would dictate the direction the current heads in. There’s never a question of technical possibilities (we’ve learned that from Cyanogen), but politics and agendas are and always will be part of the industry. They’re part of most – if not all – industries.
So, am I understanding it correctly that they’re developing this for the iOS devices as they are but limiting it tegra 2 devices for Android even though a Galaxy S has superior gaming hardware to the current batch of iOS devices… strange.
So, am I understanding it correctly that they’re developing this for the iOS devices as they are but limiting it tegra 2 devices for Android even though a Galaxy S has superior gaming hardware to the current batch of iOS devices… strange.
Camp Android is already too fragmented. Like kwyjibo said, this is the last thing we need. How about smoothing out Android on existing devices? FroYo still ain’t that smooth on Desire…
Hopefully we can build “custom” android phones soon. Being able to swap out what needs to be swapped when we need to, ex. CPU, GPU, RAM… soon it’ll be like building a computer lol
That is correct @ Cable.
@Reap, don’t bet on it. They already tried that with laptops the better part of a decade ago. :P —
As for Tegra phones, what’s the battery life going to be like on those things? nVidia’s “low power” ION hardware divides a netbook’s battery life by 4, I can only imagine if Tegra will do the same to phones. If you get less game time than a PSP, you may as well forget it. Also, I’m calling out on the Tegra requirement as well. iOS devices run a PowerVR SGX535, second generation Snapdragons have comparable graphics hardware and Galaxy S devices have superior GPUs.
Thus why I said the reasoning may be because it’s easier to develop against NVIDIA’s architecture. It may be technically possible, but to ask a small developer such as Trendy to develop and test against multiple platforms simultaneously is unrealistic. Especially for Android where the platform as a whole is still trying to find its gaming identity on the software side.
Fine with me. I get yearly upgrades so I want to see something worth buying by June :) Evo is still kicking ass but I need my yearly fix.
Though I have no love for Microsoft or Apple, I think Google could learn a thing or two from them about keeping their phones easy to develop for. Google’s hand-off approach to many aspects of Android has made a lot of developers leery of the platform especially for games, which can require certain hardware features, and a lot of additional testing to account for different GPU/screen res/control type combos but which are still expected by users to “just work”
Hi ,,,
It`s not true ,because Tegra 2 & Hummingbird have the same graphic processing power: 90M Triangle/second
Great demo, I am excited about these nice looking games!
I suspect the ‘requirement’ is a lazy way of ensuring the program runs well; much easier to code ‘is this hardware present’ under Android than to come up with a way of determining ‘minimum system requirements’ like on a PC. PC gamers tend to pick up a box and look at the requirements… mobile device gamers are much more like console gamers. They see ‘for Xbox 360’ and go ‘I have that! I can use that!’ and just grab it, where here you replace ‘Android’ with ‘Xbox 360.’
Saying “this requires a Tegra device” is a shortcut to saying “this requires a relatively modern Android device with good 3D performance.” Heck, there may be a ‘requires Tegra’ type flag you can put in app data for the Market that prevents the app showing up at all on older devices, thus avoiding “but it runs too slow on my Droid Eris!” complaints and bad reviews.
I put on my robe and wizzard hat…
I think it is because hummingbird is just for one phone-samsung’s, while tegra 2 will be on android phones from several oem’s.
hopefully someone can remove the check out of the apk that requires specific hardware.. if its that simple
I’m gonna sue all these companies! Every day there is a new android phone, its not fair! It’s not exclusive anymore
Dual core anyone? It has to happen at some point. It’s already been suggested for the tegra 2 and for mobile applications. That’s what I’m holding out for. Sadly, I know it will probably be a long wait.
another factor that may have an impact on this the dalvik vm. unlike ms or apple which has direct access to hw, programming for android is basically only for the vm itself. the ndk provides ways to generate native calls but i’m not sure if a gaming engine may be implemented efficiently taking runtime speed and code size in consideration. another approach is to build a custom stack down to the bare metal and somehow make it cooperate with whole android runtime, i’d guess, requires a lot of resources to say the least.
considering all that, one may wait for a faster processor which will make the vm faster which in turn, will run the program faster, or wait for the chip vendor to create the custom stack.
itll be in the nexus two.
Epic should at least support Galaxy S series.
Out of all the Androids, the Galaxy S is the most similar to the iPhone 4 spec-wise. The Hummingbird and A4 are both developed and manufactured by Intrinsity and Samsung; The iPhone 4 has a PowerVR SGX 535, and the Galaxy S has a PowerVR SGX 540. Spec wise, the Galaxy S is a beefier iPhone 4.
I’m sure that the Tegra 2 based cell phones will blow everything out of the water when it comes out, but not supporting the Galaxy S series is a mistake since most people who already own a Galaxy S won’t be upgrading their phone until their contract lets them upgrade using their carrier’s subsidization policy (For AT&T, it’s 2 years). The people who went with a Galaxy S now is most likely the target audience that Epic should be aiming to get.
Tegra 2’s GPU is way weaker than Galaxy S.
http://smartphonebenchmarks.com/forum/index.php?/topic/94-looking-into-samsung-orion-samsungs-implementation-of-arm-cortex-a9/
Is there any Tegra device commercial today? Ooh wait there is one Toshiba AC100…and the graphics on that one sucks…checkout the Tegra2 benchmarking on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJav9ns6b4o
How do you explain that? I think this article is baseless at this point. How do you backup all that you said when you have nothing to prove it? You just lost your credibility
Everyone seems to be getting excited by “the evils of marketing” and “lazy game developers”. For the first, no one has batted an eye lid over the last 30 years as Intel and Microsoft have asked you to shell out a thousand quid every two years to run excel slower and slower on the latest bloaty OS.
Here you have a platform that has inherited real 3D architecture from the the domains of games consoles and PCs and everyone is moaning that the existing game engines aren’t being ported to another proprietry mobile platform with no gaming pedigree and no defined future roadmap. If I was a game publisher, would I wait for the next slew of new and quirky hardware from the phone manufaturers or would I stick to Tegra. Let me see I’ve got an industry standard core logic in ARM and an industry standard 3D platform integrated into the rest of the chip, it’s not apple, it runs Android, it runs cool and it’s not just confined to a single phone manufacurer. For those guys this is a no brainer, and “newsflash”, Nvidia is a company that works closely with games publishers already, do they really want to split their teams to support engines on platfroms that may have no/poorly defined long term futures.
If it bothers you that much just hang in there for another couple of months and either change network provider; hence, score a free phone or demand a free upgrade. Given those economics you can’t loose unless you happen to be some sort of nurdy fan of a particular technology. For gods sake there’s more important things going on in the world than Samsungs cack technology strategy. I’m rather more concerned by the fact that the banking industry’s recent evils has ensured that we’ll all work another ten years before we retire; and you think Nvidia is evil, wake up!
You guys are so lame, Game Devs are out to make money and they could care less about fanboy wars. Android is fragmented and there are very few Tegra 2 devices and the rest of Android world is filled with under powered crap.
iOS wins because 1 OS, 2 sets of hardware to support and that’s it. There are over 80 million existing iphone 3GS/4 out there compare to less than 30,000 Tegra 2 Android devices.
Why would anyone waste time and money on a tiny platform need to get a job.