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]