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I've been playing around my newly bought Nexus One and one thing I've found is that while graphics and colours when doing most things in general are so vibrant and beautiful to look at, games look decidedly 2nd rate.
Why is that? Is that something to do with the hardware or the APIs provided by Google? It would be nice to see something like Plants vs Zombies on the iPhone. From my limited use I find the graphics on my Nexus One slightly better than the 3GS on everything except when it comes to games, where it is left far behind. I found that really weird.
On a related note, I'm no developer myself, but I'm of the opinion that the success of the platform will depend a lot on 3rd party development, which means a lot of support given by Google to developers. What's the situation like now? How easy/hard is to develop for Android phones and what are the scopes for improvement?
Bump.
Any opinions from Android developers on here?
its because pre nexus one/desire there was only one android phone which could even play good graphics and that was the moto droid .
give the developers some time ... now that more powerful android phones are coming out, we'll see more and more better looking games ... as an example look at raging thunder 2 ... you might not like racing games but that game has exceptional graphics
nothing as good as the iphone yet, because iphone always had a very powerful gpu from the get go so all of iphone game developers have had that much time to play around with them ... android just started getting powerful gpus
hope that answers ... and anyone with more knowledge, feel free to correct me if i'm wrong
alienwolf426 said:
nothing as good as the iphone yet, because iphone always had a very powerful gpu from the get go so all of iphone game developers have had that much time to play around with them ... android just started getting powerful gpus
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Thanks for the explanation, makes sense. Which new Android phones have good GPUs on board?
Watch out here comes the "Droids"
TT1986 said:
Thanks for the explanation, makes sense. Which new Android phones have good GPUs on board?[/QUOTE
Galaxy S doing video game demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpP5QljEqow&feature=related
Galaxy S vs. Iphone 4:
http://3gsiphone.com/jailbreak-and-...-vs-samsung-galaxy-s-video-review-part-1.html
Reading about GPU:
http://androidandme.com/2010/03/new...bird-chip-to-have-3x-gpu-power-of-snapdragon/
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jhnstn00 said:
TT1986 said:
Thanks for the explanation, makes sense. Which new Android phones have good GPUs on board?[/QUOTE
Galaxy S doing video game demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpP5QljEqow&feature=related
Galaxy S vs. Iphone 4:
http://3gsiphone.com/jailbreak-and-...-vs-samsung-galaxy-s-video-review-part-1.html
Reading about GPU:
http://androidandme.com/2010/03/new...bird-chip-to-have-3x-gpu-power-of-snapdragon/
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Whoa! That is good.
Excellent stuff, good times ahead then.
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its mostly due to the fact that a lot of older phones (eg. the htc hero) dont have gpus whatsoever. the moto droid had a gpu, therefore could run good graphics in a 3d game. the samsung galaxy S has a great gpu on the cpu die and will run some really impressive games on it, in fact, it could run much better looking games than on the iphone.
for a art developers view
Ok well I'm a 14+ year vet of games industry on console games, in technical art production, but my view would be the same as a programmer I would suspect. Just like when doing a multi-platform release back in the ps, saturn, n64, dreamcast etc... days, you dont really want to do lots of work for all platforms. Neither do you want to cut your biggest market chunk out by them not getting the experience others get with better hardware. This takes me back to PC days when we have powerVR primary GPU's, or ATI, or Nvidia, or matrox, well the list got big. The graphics capabilities sometimes had to be addressed almost as if they were different platforms (this is b4 HAL abstraction sweetness and todays DX domination). I suppose at the end of the day, I would not choose to dev only on android for the SGS, that cuts some 99% of the market out. What apple has done is have fixed hardware and Development LIBs for that hardware. This makes it very easy to give all iPhone users the same experience. With android, too many variances in hardware and capability, also maybe hits taken from phone operator system additions and services.
So in my opinion, you cant have such and open system that can have lots of variations and get games in numbers and quality that we see on iphone. Not cause android phones cant do it. Cause not all of them can etc, and it's too varied.
Just my opinion
deanwray said:
So in my opinion, you cant have such and open system that can have lots of variations and get games in numbers and quality that we see on iphone. Not cause android phones cant do it. Cause not all of them can etc, and it's too varied.
Just my opinion
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I see what you mean. It's a lot like Console vs PC isn't it? I'm a PC gamer but i can understand why publishers/developers prefer console because they don't have to deal with a large variety of hardware. In other words, optimizing gaming experiences on Android phones could be harder than on iPhones because of the same reason.
Lets hope the difference isn't too big though.
TT1986 said:
I see what you mean. It's a lot like Console vs PC isn't it? I'm a PC gamer but i can understand why publishers/developers prefer console because they don't have to deal with a large variety of hardware. In other words, optimizing gaming experiences on Android phones could be harder than on iPhones because of the same reason.
Lets hope the difference isn't too big though.
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Porting from PC to console and vice-versa is probably easier than iPhone to Android, though.
I remember Valve saying that porting The Orange Box over to the Xbox 360 was very easy. They said something like they put the PC code -- with a few changes like control configuration -- through a 360 compiler and the game was up and running.
Also, with the PC, you have just two major processor brands (Intel and AMD) and two major graphics card brands (NVIDIA and ATI). The APIs and stuff are also far more mature.
google could do what Palm did.
Palms PDK allows porting of iPhone games to the Pre in a matter of hours.
theineffablebob said:
I remember Valve saying that porting The Orange Box over to the Xbox 360 was very easy. They said something like they put the PC code -- with a few changes like control configuration -- through a 360 compiler and the game was up and running.
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That's probably because it's made in XNA or some other cross platform code. That's one of the things pulling me toward WP7 (that and Zune Pass ).
Devs can write one code base, and in a matter of days have it ported to all major Microsoft software. As an Android dev myself, that would be amazingly useful did I also produce desktop software. I mean think about it, write an app for PC, then also target XBOX360, ZuneHD, normal Zunes, and WP7 all with essentially one codebase with very few small changes between them. That's some amazing stuff.
I toyed with XNA before and it is a beautiful way to code. Not to mention that the C# it uses is essentially Java with a few modifications.
Ok, I had a Samsung Galaxy S this time last year which I ended up returning within the 14 day "Trial" and went for the iphone 4 instead.
My main concern and the main reason I went back to Apple/ios was because of the fantastic developer support the idevices have, they have pretty much every major big name developer and all the indie developers making games and apps for the platform, this just wasn't the case with Android last year, I was soooo disappointed by the gaming side of things with android.
Anyway, a year has passed and i'm back! this time with an Xperia Play with the latest Android OS and i'm ready to see how much has changed in that year! but wait..... still pretty much how I left the scene a year ago with the exception of gameloft and rovio who now release decent games on the platform.
My questions:
Where are all the big name developers on Android? why aren't they here? will they ever be here? infinitly blade, plants vs zombies, real racing, field runners, we rule etc?
Where are all the great apps and games from the Apple App Store? surely its easy to port them over to Android? and the ones we do get look bad compared to the idevice versions even though our android devices are more powerful, why is this?
Have I backed the wrong horse again? I really hope not......
I love Android as an OS, very cool but I can't help but feel it is lagging so far behind in the app/game/appstore race that it can't ever compete now, am I wrong?
Our Android devices are very powerful, why are no games showing off our hardware? Asphalt 6 looks stunning on my Xperia Play and using the gaming pad is amazing but is that it?
1. Money. Still it's much easier to monetize your work in AppStore than in Android Market. First, Android community likes openness, free software, etc., but iPhone users... they could spend 1000$ for a featureless I'm Rich App ;-) Second, it's much easier to steal/pirate apps on Android.
2. Native development was neglected by Google for long time. Main effort was put into Java development and C didn't have access to many Android APIs. Recently Google has added most of required APIs, but...
3. Android devices are poorly supported by their manufacturers. If you want to use newest features in your app then you have to develop for <6 months old devices. And, as mentioned above, many features which are important for gaming were added recently.
4. Device differences. Even if all Android devices would be perfect and fully compatible with each other, there're still various screen sizes and resolutions, CPU/GPU power, etc. When you develop a game for iOS, you have to buy iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad and iPad 2, test it on these devices and set visual quality specifically for them, so game will run smoothly. If you want to develop for Android, you have to think of potentially every possible screen size, ratio and resolution, you have to test it on as much devices as possible and try to guess proper visual quality on a device or add feature for setting it by the user - as in PC games. It's much more complicated.
But I'm not a game developer, so maybe some of above problems aren't true and maybe there are more of them.
Brut.all said:
1. Money. Still it's much easier to monetize your work in AppStore than in Android Market. First, Android community likes openness, free software, etc., but iPhone users... they could spend 1000$ for a featureless I'm Rich App ;-) Second, it's much easier to steal/pirate apps on Android.
2. Native development was neglected by Google for long time. Main effort was put into Java development and C didn't have access to many Android APIs. Recently Google has added most of required APIs, but...
3. Android devices are poorly supported by their manufacturers. If you want to use newest features in your app then you have to develop for <6 months old devices. And, as mentioned above, many features which are important for gaming were added recently.
4. Device differences. Even if all Android devices would be perfect and fully compatible with each other, there're still various screen sizes and resolutions, CPU/GPU power, etc. When you develop a game for iOS, you have to buy iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad and iPad 2, test it on these devices and set visual quality specifically for them, so game will run smoothly. If you want to develop for Android, you have to think of potentially every possible screen size, ratio and resolution, you have to test it on as much devices as possible and try to guess proper visual quality on a device or add feature for setting it by the user - as in PC games. It's much more complicated.
But I'm not a game developer, so maybe some of above problems aren't true and maybe there are more of them.
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Thanks! I didn't want to sound negative but would love to see Android do well on the gaming side of thing, hopefully this will happen one day?
Plants vs Zombies is due to be released on Android in the next couple months.
technoplunk said:
Plants vs Zombies is due to be released on Android in the next couple months.
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Is that it?!
yes, yes i have searched the google and the only answers i found were from early 2010's... are there any news if android will ever be gpu-accelerated? or would they have to start from start to make it happen? thx.
Samsung had done that on their new phones
Its True
Galaxy S II is the only phone one the market with that capability or maybe MALI 400 is just THAT AWESOME.
akbisw said:
Galaxy S II is the only phone one the market with that capability or maybe MALI 400 is just THAT AWESOME.
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yes samsung galaxy s2 is having hardware acceleration and same they are trying to implement in cyanogen mod, that's why they hired the owner of cyanogen
really and why does samsung hire and pay cyanogen dev to implement hardware acceleration in cyanogen?
akbarhash said:
really and why does samsung hire and pay cyanogen dev to implement hardware acceleration in cyanogen?
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most probably because alot of people don't like touch wiz.
GPU acceleration for the UI elements is definetly present in Honeycomb but therefore only on Tablets. So the big question is, whether they'll put it on phones with Ice Cream Sandwich or not.
Personally I'm afraid they won't ever bring it to phones according to the argumentation at the beginning in this GoogleIO 2011 talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9S5EO7CLjo
Basic gist: multi-core processors are enough on small screen devices to handle UI drawing which I think is a terrible argumentation.
Of course I hope I'm wrong
Androyonisus said:
GPU acceleration for the UI elements is definetly present in Honeycomb but therefore only on Tablets. So the big question is, whether they'll put it on phones with Ice Cream Sandwich or not.
Personally I'm afraid they won't ever bring it to phones according to the argumentation at the beginning in this GoogleIO 2011 talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9S5EO7CLjo
Basic gist: multi-core processors are enough on small screen devices to handle UI drawing which I think is a terrible argumentation.
Of course I hope I'm wrong
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I really hope ics has hardware acceleration. It's one of the things the iphone has over android. The ui is just so smooth.
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Hello everyone,
Just for the sake of fun. If you have been given the opportunity to decide the future of android, What would you do? Which feature do you want to see in android?
May be people @ Google are 'really' watching this thread. Who knows?
Shoot your opinions
PS: I would say, a multi user (logoff and on) feature so that one can change profiles in office and home. (Haven't seen this as native android feature)
Feature wise, I'd push for smoother graphics, put an end to the "iPhone is faster" trolls.
Smoother ...more exclusives to android.. game mostly ...as gamevil seem to stick every thing on iPhone first ..
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One of the things that holds back game developers is having to do extra work to support multiple GPUs (Tegra, OMAP, Adreno, etc). It would be nice if Android had something like DirectX on Windows where the GPU brand doesn't matter, instead the GPU is certified for a DirectX # level and can run all games up to that #.
There have been some good games out there that were Tegra only early on for example and when you see its incompatible with your graphically capable OMAP device its not good. Judging from the reviews left people don't like when this happens.
I really don't understand why android cannot run as smooth as iphone, i think it's really system problem rather than hardware's problem...
crazyricky said:
I really don't understand why android cannot run as smooth as iphone, i think it's really system problem rather than hardware's problem...
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Apple have a few phones they build inhouse, and create software and drivers for it, that they can constantly tune and improve.
Google on the other hand, have to support an unlimited amount of devices and drivers, so they don't get the same time to improve drivers. Not to mention you then get 3rd parties with their own skins and what not.
It's the price we pay for freedom
I know the current answer is not possible with current released source code (only support for tegra 2/3). And a 2nd answer is nothing official is announced regarding any shield source code release. However I want to throw this out there as a topic of discussion.
How likely do you guys feel Linux for tegra (straight Linux not android and possibly dual boot /w android) is going to find its way to the shield and what it could mean for the shield?
For those that don't quite see the point, look into the openpandora project. While desktop experience computing is a major advantage of having straight Linux in that form factor of a handheld, arguably the greatest advantage it also offers is direct access to the HAL (hardware abstraction layer; Frame buffer etc etc) it gives a significant boost in performance in emulators and games over android even with its use of the NDK. Removes even the most minor latency in games for the most purest of experiences.
Games / emulators can be written in straight c, c++, assembly, or a plethora of different programming languages without being wrapped in java or using the multiple abstraction layers android uses and you get the full potential of your hardware.
This isn't an android hate post by any means, but more of a promotion of Linux for tegra and what it could benefit if paired with shield.
So thoughts? chances of seeing it supported? Interest? Ideas? Potential additional uses?
johnsongrantr said:
I know the current answer is not possible with current released source code (only support for tegra 2/3). And a 2nd answer is nothing official is announced regarding any shield source code release. However I want to throw this out there as a topic of discussion.
How likely do you guys feel Linux for tegra (straight Linux not android and possibly dual boot /w android) is going to find its way to the shield and what it could mean for the shield?
For those that don't quite see the point, look into the openpandora project. While desktop experience computing is a major advantage of having straight Linux in that form factor of a handheld, arguably the greatest advantage it also offers is direct access to the HAL (hardware abstraction layer; Frame buffer etc etc) it gives a significant boost in performance in emulators and games over android even with its use of the NDK. Removes even the most minor latency in games for the most purest of experiences.
Games / emulators can be written in straight c, c++, assembly, or a plethora of different programming languages without being wrapped in java or using the multiple abstraction layers android uses and you get the full potential of your hardware.
This isn't an android hate post by any means, but more of a promotion of Linux for tegra and what it could benefit if paired with shield.
So thoughts? chances of seeing it supported? Interest? Ideas? Potential additional uses?
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I am unaware of a L4T build, and it likely would be lacking some significant features (like touchscreen support). That said, I also disagree with the statements about being faster due to direct access to the HAL. While it is true that L4T would give you direct access to the frame buffer, what it *doesn't* give you is any GPU support. The GPU turns into nothing but a pixel pusher. All rendering must be done in software on the processor. While this isn't a big deal for older emulators on platforms which don't support native 3D, games that do support the GPU for more than pixel pushing can run faster with less latency because the system isn't as busy rendering the graphics.
agrabren said:
I am unaware of a L4T build, and it likely would be lacking some significant features (like touchscreen support). That said, I also disagree with the statements about being faster due to direct access to the HAL. While it is true that L4T would give you direct access to the frame buffer, what it *doesn't* give you is any GPU support. The GPU turns into nothing but a pixel pusher. All rendering must be done in software on the processor. While this isn't a big deal for older emulators on platforms which don't support native 3D, games that do support the GPU for more than pixel pushing can run faster with less latency because the system isn't as busy rendering the graphics.
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If L4T is built for tegra 4 and not specifically for the shield, it would undoubtedly be missing quite a few device specific drivers. I'm sure it's a bit of work to port that stuff over from android source. My understanding it's not the brunt of the work such as the chipset and gpu, having full support would make things much easier I'm sure. Thanks for the info about it probably not being worked on though, it's a little disappointing, but at least I won't have my hopes on it being released in the near future. Hopefully L4T isn't a forgotten project, and one can only hope it eventually finds it's way to being officially supported on shield.
One thing that was suggested in not so many words was possibly opening up the 3d GPU driver source for tegra 4. I am speaking out of turn for sure and should probably sit patiently until something is publicly released, and base my comments off something solid rather than hearsay, but if true it would hopefully allow for the hardware acceleration rather than just a pixel pusher. I'm out of my lane in questioning it and giving a comparison, but for the openpandora they have at least some level of gpu hardware acceleration with their powervr GPU because Texas Instruments provided it. It may only be at the same level as your talking about and just taking some of the load off the CPU rather than processing complex graphics but the difference between the point in which they implemented hardware accelerated graphics and non-hardware accelerated was quite noticeable, at least on that platform. I know they don't have full GPU driver source on that platform either just compiled binaries unfortunately. I know they would have appreciated the same level of support that was suggested for tegra 4.
I wouldn't say only older emulators and 2d games would see a benefit from straight linux support. There is some newer emulators like PPSSPP that runs visually faster on linux than it does under android on the same hardware and same clock speed and kernel. Also highly optimized emulators like pcsx rearmed that runs significantly faster on linux than android (retroarch) That's just performance clock for clock on the same hardware. That also doesn't go into the audio and input lag (however insignificant) it is still detectable under android even if the program uses the NDK. Now I would accept that it's only because of the lack of the same background processes and services, but I imagine and have been told it's more than that. It is directly linked to android's use of it's HAL's
Thanks for your insight and detailed answer, it's much appreciated, hopefully it will continue, it's good to have someone who knows what they're talking about to talk to that won't just flame you or blow you off.
Raw linux on the shield would make for a damn sweet machine but most of your reasons for doing so can be done on a rooted android device anyway (with some trickery you can bypass dalvik - yes, dalvik, android is not actually java - entirely and run native code on the linux kernel, but its not easy).
Do you have any more information about that? I've seen chrooted Linux on android is that what you're talking about?
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resurrecting the 2nd oldest post in this catagory to show this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAvXLqPKxow
source here
https://github.com/linux-shield/kernel
Knew it would be possible, if only he had the drivers to wrap that up fully.
SixSixSevenSeven said:
Knew it would be possible, if only he had the drivers to wrap that up fully.
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So far I just followed his instructions on the kernel, haven't setup a rootfs yet but if you want a copy of what I got so far you can follow below. Looks like it builds just fine.
http://forum.openhandhelds.net/index.php/topic,448.0.html