My nephews have tablets with the Tegra 4 processor but certain Android games just stopped working correctly on them. For instance, both Roblox and Hungry Shark Evolution worked just fine but after the games were updated (these were forced updates, you couldn't play the games unless you updated via Play Store) they don't work right or work at all.
For example. Roblox crashed when you select "Play" with an error that it can't write to frame or something. Hungry Shark Evolution works but the shark and other creatures/characters in game are look like black shadows (no color at all).
For comparison sake, these games run just fine on the much weaker Nextbook Ares 8. Does anyone know what's going on or how to fix this?
Being that the graphics rendering for the Tegra GPU's is different than other GPU's used by most other devices, it isn't uncommon for some apps to have issues on this and other Tegra powered devices, however it is strange that a dev would update the app and break rendering when it was previous working. Not like Tegra isn't still relevant considering the Tegra 4/K/X are all still used.
I would contact the dev for the apps and see if you can bring the issue to their attention as it previously worked. Also have you tried removing the app completely and reinstalling it just to be sure?
Yup. Tried uninstalling, rebooting, then reinstalling. Nothing changes.
The funny thing is, another Roblox player with a Tegra 4 tablet has the exact same error. So it's definitely not just my nephews tablets. I saw the post in the Roblox forum, but there is no solution to it.
It could also be partially due to the OS version. If you are on KitKat, some older games will work just fine, but once you upgrade to 5.1 (I don't recommend this on this tablet), then some newer games may now work, but older ones will no longer work.
Then the Tegra limit is still there, but it is less common now then it was a year or so ago. Really since Android is only now getting a little closer to feature parity between hardware with things like OpenGLES 3.1 and Vulkan with 6.0/7.0, any games built with that on should be ok on a lot more hardware in the long run. (pending the hardware supports it as well of course.)
Related
Does this app work on the Xperia Play. It says the phone needs to be very powerful.
Can anyone try this please.
It works absolutely flawless in Mario 64. Orcarina of Time has a few slowdowns in menus and when once scene transitions to the other, but is perfectly playable. Also, the developer announced he'll re-release it soon with much improved performance and support for the analog pads is planned - so I'd say it should work fine.
I could be wrong, but i think he is referring to the nintendo ds emulator. I honestly doubt it will perform well, even remotely playable. My desire hd has same hardware, with more ram and its not powerful enough. Unless the dev starts updating the app much much more.
Meister_Li said:
It works absolutely flawless in Mario 64. Orcarina of Time has a few slowdowns in menus and when once scene transitions to the other, but is perfectly playable. Also, the developer announced he'll re-release it soon with much improved performance and support for the analog pads is planned - so I'd say it should work fine.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
that's n64oid
this is about nds4droid a nintendo ds emulator
try tiger demo (nds emulator demo)
it's free and basically the same application
but to answer your question, runs very slowly, depending on the game 1-5fps some demos/homebrew run at 30+fps but are not commercial games
Oh sorry, you're right, he said NDS4droid ^^
Yeah, that's probably not going to run very well unless the developer somehow manages to emulate a DS with less... Well, emulation. The phone uses arm processor and, incidentially, the DS does too. Altho ours are a lot faster and, well, newer, it might be a lot easier to emulate the DS hardware on this similar hardware.
Incidentially, for the interested, the PSP does NOT use ARM processors but RISC processors, which work differently and make Emulation potentially a lot harder on our devices.
Edit: Actually, I did some more research, and it seems like the ARM architecture contains almost all RISC instructions, so emulation of PSP and PS2 games might be quite easy. Altho to make that work, the emulator will have to be directly developed for that platform and in the Android NDK. Ports of PC software will probably not be able to benefit from this similarities.
I thought PSP used MIPS?
They are not horrible but they are not smooth as glass either. I know the simple answer is they are not optimized for tegra 3, but what does that actually mean? What I'm getting at is I'm used to the pc world of things. Let's say when doom 3 came out and my system could barely muster 25 fps on it. Well, 3 years later when I get a new kick-ass machine, it can crank out 60+ in doom 3 without breaking a sweat and doesn't need to be 'optimized' for my new card. It's opengl compatible so it's good to go.
I use doom 3 as an example because it's opengl as are android based games. But even on the direct x side, say batman arkham asylum/city. If your card is dx 11 capable you get some additional effects but for the most part the faster your card the more fps/higher res you can run it at, again no optimizations required. Yes sometimes patches are needed (I'm looking at you ATI), but that's dealing with bugs.
It's rare that a newer card would have performance issues that an older card wouldn't with the same game. Rarely there would be an issue like a game doesn't vsync properly and runs too fast or maybe crashes and needs a patch, but they never actually need to be optimized for a specific card/chipset.
So if these games are opengl based, what does that actually mean here? And say they release new versions that are tegra 3 optimized (and charge again?!) say two years down the line when some other chipset is popular, would they yet again need to be optimized?
I thought the tegra 3 is one of if not the fastest video chipsets for android (and from what I've read it is) but it's disappointing to see some games not perform well and get the reason 'not optimized'. Not really complaining, but would like to understand how this works behind the scenes and will it continue to be an issue with future chipsets.
this is pure speculation, as i have little knowledge with this sort of thing, but maybe the games are not making use of the 4 cores at all, and only seeing the companion core. or maybe just the companion core, and one other.
I've both games on mine, but they run like butter.
My os is rooted stock
I don't really use the N7 for gaming as I already own a high-end gaming computer, besides I find tablets kind of uncomfortable for serious gaming, but I keep finding games that don't run as smooth as they should because of the same reason: This game is not optimized for tegra 3. I can't help but wonder: Will they ever optimize games for tegra 3? And I mean generally, not just a couple of games.
As you ask for "generally" i.e. ALL future games, the answer will (with a probabilty of 87.4%) be: No, they won't.
I don't think you can ever have "serious gaming" on a touch screen. You need real controllers or a keyboard + mouse for that. I also don't think you're going to get your serious gaming on a device that has 1GB of ram and runs everything in a virtual machine. You've got the whole android OS running along side the game, so the game is having to share that piddly 1GB of ram.
Look at the minimum requirements for big PC games and then look at the resources available to games on this tablet. The nexus doesnt even have half the specs for the lowest recommended settings in far cry 3, dishonored, dark souls, most of the other games that showed up on the list when I googled for "popular PC games".
http://www.game-debate.com/games/index.php?g_id=3410&game=Dark Souls
http://www.game-debate.com/games/index.php?g_id=2186&game=Dishonored
http://www.game-debate.com/games/index.php?g_id=883&game=Far Cry 3
In most cases, I'd say developers won't take the time to optimize a game for a specific CPU. SoCs change about as often as you change your underwear. What is hot today will be obsolete next quarter and a handfull of newer chips will be out. If game makers had to optimize every game for every possible SoC, they'd never get nything released.
gianptune said:
I don't think you can ever have "serious gaming" on a touch screen. You need real controllers or a keyboard + mouse for that. I also don't think you're going to get your serious gaming on a device that has 1GB of ram and runs everything in a virtual machine. You've got the whole android OS running along side the game, so the game is having to share that piddly 1GB of ram.
Look at the minimum requirements for big PC games and then look at the resources available to games on this tablet. The nexus doesnt even have half the specs for the lowest recommended settings in far cry 3, dishonored, dark souls, most of the other games that showed up on the list when I googled for "popular PC games".
http://www.game-debate.com/games/index.php?g_id=3410&game=Dark Souls
http://www.game-debate.com/games/index.php?g_id=2186&game=Dishonored
http://www.game-debate.com/games/index.php?g_id=883&game=Far Cry 3
In most cases, I'd say developers won't take the time to optimize a game for a specific CPU. SoCs change about as often as you change your underwear. What is hot today will be obsolete next quarter and a handfull of newer chips will be out. If game makers had to optimize every game for every possible SoC, they'd never get nything released.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
And where did I say I wanted to use it for serious gaming? Read the first post again because it seems you didn't understand it quite well. I'm just wondering if tegra 3 will be of any use in the future, nothing else.
It is not in game makers' interest to optimize games for specific chipsets. They make more money by cranking out 1 version of a game that runs on as many devices as possible. If they spend 3 months optimizing it for our chip, and then 3 months optimizing it for the snapdragon s4, the game is already released 6 months later and costs much more to make.
They will only optimize a game for the tegra3 if they are sure they can get their money back out of that extra effort. Will they sell enough "tegra optimized" versions to make up for all the copies they didn't sell in their 3 months of delay? Will they sell enough copies to pay the people that worked to do the optimizing? Do they even want to pay somebody to sit and figure out the math on that?
My point of view
gianptune said:
I don't think you can ever have "serious gaming" on a touch screen. You need real controllers or a keyboard + mouse for that. I also don't think you're going to get your serious gaming on a device that has 1GB of ram and runs everything in a virtual machine. You've got the whole android OS running along side the game, so the game is having to share that piddly 1GB of ram.
Look at the minimum requirements for big PC games and then look at the resources available to games on this tablet. The nexus doesnt even have half the specs for the lowest recommended settings in far cry 3, dishonored, dark souls, most of the other games that showed up on the list when I googled for "popular PC games".
...cut...
In most cases, I'd say developers won't take the time to optimize a game for a specific CPU. SoCs change about as often as you change your underwear. What is hot today will be obsolete next quarter and a handfull of newer chips will be out. If game makers had to optimize every game for every possible SoC, they'd never get nything released.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If you compare the situation with PC gaming, it's also a matter about different CPU architectures (x86 vs ARM), CISC vs RISC etc., it's not only a matter of plain comparison of MHz or RAM.
However Tegra 3 IMHO sadly gave results below expectations in gaming due its limited memory bandwidth that's an issue for high resolution screens. So even if it's an overall good SoC, I think we won't see many optimized games for it, mainly because the market leader (yeah, it's the bitten apple in the gaming department), focuses on different specs and recode a game to fit the requirements costs too much compared to the revenue they could achieve with a tailored version.
The saddest thing (and I hope to be proved wrong), is that with the release of Tegra 4, we'll be forgot like the devices with Tegra 2...
There are a couple of nice games to get, I wished there where free ones though which where tegra optimised so I could see the difference.
But with all the different chipsets they would never do it, and if they where going to do it id say they would optimse the chipset what samsung uses because there are so many more of those sold.
N732 said:
I'm just wondering if tegra 3 will be of any use in the future, nothing else.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Tegra 3's future started about a year ago, and will be over some time next year. 'tis the nature of SoC's.
Loved the underwear comment above (c: and there is a fair amount of truth in it. While seeing the Tegra optimized stuff was cool, it is a sales tool with a limited window.
N732 said:
I don't really use the N7 for gaming as I already own a high-end gaming computer, besides I find tablets kind of uncomfortable for serious gaming, but I keep finding games that don't run as smooth as they should because of the same reason: This game is not optimized for tegra 3. I can't help but wonder: Will they ever optimize games for tegra 3? And I mean generally, not just a couple of games.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Download the Tegrazone app. There's a good many optimized games and some great free ones like shadowgun: Deadzone
I have poor gaming performance on my i9505. It's not lagging, but the FPS is not high enought to play the games smoothly. Actually I was waiting that all games will run smooth, when I was buing i9505, but I'm really disappointed.
for example Real Racing 3 doesnt run smoothly on high and ultra high details (which are default for i9505)- the more cars on the screen, the poor the performance.
Simpsons Tapped out - the same problem, game is lagging on some parts of the city. Actually the game has the same poor performance as on galaxy S2.
GTA Vice City also poor performance on medium and higher details.
Doesn't helps to restart the phone, there is enough available RAM +200MB when playing any game. The CPU monitor shows, that 1core runs on 100%, second core 50% and 3,4th core 0% on every game, clock is set aroung 1GHz. I'm running stock android 4.3 with touchwiz
Is it a problem of poor GPU performance, or the apps are not optimized?
Does anybody other has the same problem?
maybe there is an solution to lock GPU clock and prevent phone from downgrading the GPU clock...
Why is the phone running at 1GHz? Stock for the phone is 1.9GHz?
energy savings on?
no no, the phone is running OK, I don't have enabled power saving.
The clock of the CPU changes depending on the CPU load - it works good.
But for example, when I'm playing real racing 3 on default graphics settings, the CPU clock changes, but in average, the clock is around 1.2GHz and usually only 2 cores active. But sometimes and all it's cores goes on 100%. - this works OK.
But I don't understand, why most of the games are not smooth, and doesn't load the cpu on 100% to get smoother - that's the problem. Or maybe it's a problem of GPU?
Or the question could be: How to get the maximum performance from i9505? Because I don't think, that the games are using all of the phone performance and therefore the games are not smooth.
niio said:
no no, the phone is running OK, I don't have enabled power saving.
The clock of the CPU changes depending on the CPU load - it works good.
But for example, when I'm playing real racing 3 on default graphics settings, the CPU clock changes, but in average, the clock is around 1.2GHz and usually only 2 cores active. But sometimes and all it's cores goes on 100%. - this works OK.
But I don't understand, why most of the games are not smooth, and doesn't load the cpu on 100% to get smoother - that's the problem. Or maybe it's a problem of GPU?
Or the question could be: How to get the maximum performance from i9505? Because I don't think, that the games are using all of the phone performance and therefore the games are not smooth.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Gameloft and other companies have not remotely optimised their games for the S4 archetecture, so they just lag and run poorly. ART in Kitkat may well solve a lot of this issue once it is fully implemented and supported. Some games run fantastically well (bard's tale) and others (gameloft, gta vice city and others) run absolutely awful. I installed them on S3 and they run great, and the CPU useage and GPU is far better. It's a mix of the S4 and the game devs. OpenGL ES3.0 helps in 4.3 (especially google edition, touchwiz slows EVERYTHING) and ART hopefully will help again in 4.4.
RossFixxed said:
Gameloft and other companies have not remotely optimised their games for the S4 archetecture, so they just lag and run poorly. ART in Kitkat may well solve a lot of this issue once it is fully implemented and supported. Some games run fantastically well (bard's tale) and others (gameloft, gta vice city and others) run absolutely awful. I installed them on S3 and they run great, and the CPU useage and GPU is far better. It's a mix of the S4 and the game devs. OpenGL ES3.0 helps in 4.3 (especially google edition, touchwiz slows EVERYTHING) and ART hopefully will help again in 4.4.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
so one option is to flash stock android without touchwiz, or second option is to wait for 4.4, which will come in next year?
niio said:
so one option is to flash stock android without touchwiz, or second option is to wait for 4.4, which will come in next year?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I find the Google Edition better, but far from perfect for gaming. I'm using a rom for Google Edition. 4.4 can be flashed now with ART support, but as it is Alpha/Beta status at the moment (even though alpha/beta aren't used as they actually are in software testing) so there are niggles and bugs. I'd say flash 4.3 and see if any better, keep backups, and maybe if you're adventurous try 4.4.
As I say it's better but badly optimised games will just be badly optimised games that lag and stutter. That's gameloft in my experience in general. Filter reviews by 'from this device model only' on the play store and see how many 1 star reveiws there are from S4 users. The S3 is far faster with the same games side by side. ART better sort this rubbish out!
so maybe it's a reason to move to iOS, where the apps are perfectly optimized
niio said:
so maybe it's a reason to move to iOS, where the apps are perfectly optimized
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
As much as I love Android, the user experience on iOS is really really lovely. The games load so well and they tend (not always) to run great! Both have their advantages and disadvantages, and I don't buy into this calling names rubbish android forums always devlove into. The best user experience for me on all my devices is the iPad. It's pretty much perfect out of the box.
Obvioiusly iOS is very restrictive and closed and the keyboard drives me mad, but yeah it's a good alternative to Android.
Writing an Android app is an exercise in sacrifice. Hey there's a cool new feature in 4.3 I can use for notifications... and 95% of my customer base is gone already on older versions etc. It's very, very annoying. And throw in OEM messing with the OS and you have a huge fragmented mess on your hands.
iOS ain't perfect but let's not be totally blinded to its positive points.
EDIT: My current setup I tend to use most is my S4 (GE rom) and iPad for tablet. Seem to suit best
I've got a windows 8 razer edge pro in my house that I was attempting to get dying light to run on, and it seems the game doesn't like the base CPU speed(1.9GHz). Unfortunately, instead of letting me test and see for myself it enforces some minimum specs to even launch the main page, but I'm quite confident the game will run fine on the tablet, and would like to get the chance to fail for myself instead of being immediately shut down. Does anyone know of any method I can use to block or spoof a program's hardware check so I can test run the game?
not sure about spoofing hardware spec
sure you can run this game ok?
your CPU doesnt meet even the minimum requirements and your GPU isnt supported either. not played the game myself but read that this game doesnt run that well even on a decent pc.
from my experience of pc gaming, even the minimum requirements isnt enough for a enjoyable, playable experience
i agree though. Id prefer to test it and see for myself that its unplayable than the game just asuming the specs arent good enough.
I've heard it's pretty unoptimized CPU-wise, so I'm not entirely certain. However, I've been playing the game on my desktop, which is quite old. The benchmark scores on the desktop's Nvidia 450 GTS are roughly similar to the edge's mobile video card(about a 10% higher benchmark, but it runs very well without minimizing every setting), and both cards support DX11.
The CPU might be an issue, but it does support 3 GHz turbo, and is an i7. My desktop runs a similar generation i3 at 3.2GHz, which also has a similar benchmark to the 1.9GHz i7 in the tablet even without turbo, so I'm just tempted to test everything. I just find it unfortunate I'm being prevented from doing so, and became interested in the longterm ability to spoof past an application's checks. I'm a bit worried these mandatory checks may become more common.
I appreciate the reply, steam posts seem to be full of "Get better hardware lol" style replies instead of solutions.