Ouya Performance Not Particularly Exciting

hypnosec writes "Results of recent benchmark tests reveal that Ouya is not up to the mark and there are over 70 other ARM devices that perform better than the gaming console. Futuremark, which is known for its benchmarks like 3DMark and PCMark, benchmarked mobile devices and the Tegra 3 powered Ouya has been ranked 73rd." Of course, most of the those devices cost a lot more than $100 without carrier subsidies.

Comments

800,000 Applications

[tuppe666]

This. Sadly, I personally don't think that Ouya content is going to be able to carry it though.

Except right now even before launch it has potentially more games than xbox360, ps3; and wii combined...and cheap too, most under a dollar. Everything from throwaway games to 20hr RPG's, Lets be honest most modern game engines work on Android. In fact the only problem it has is making out the quality from the...not so quality

Re:800,000 Applications

[fearofcarpet]

However, for sake of argument, let's just pretend that potential games somehow become real games (by magic, we must assume). Then what? Will people want to run them on a slow console? Why? Because it's $99?

Of course! :-)

Or you expect me to waste 600USD on a state of the art console to play these cheap games? ;-)

OUYA will not steal high end console's market. OUYA will succeed only if a latent low profile gaming market is out there, waiting to be discovered and exploited, I mean, explored. :-)

Not only that, but you're paying through the nose for increasingly locked-down consoles designed with the EA mentality of bleeding your bank account dry while you play. Personally I'm done with Nintendo/Sony/MS consoles and their push to lock you into some sort of on-line somethingaverse where you spend Itchy and Scratchy money on stuff that should have been included with the $60 game that is locked to your specific console for no justifiable reason. And as someone that travels between countries, don't get me started on region locking and the "helpful feature" of switching to the language of whatever country your IP address originated from. I don't care about on-line multiplayer, I don't want to create an avatar, I'm not interested in being called a faggot by some preteen with too much free time, I don't want to have to sign in to a server to play a single player game, and I will only tolerate DRM that is as unobtrusive as Steam... and by that I mean I'm willing to pay because Steam is actually easier than pirating.

Re:800,000 Applications

[bfandreas]

This could well be very true. I backed it on Kickstarter precisely because I wanted a low power ARM-based 1080p media device that was more flexible than offerings from Sony, MS, Nintendo. Had no real interest in it personally as a gaming console.

That said... I read TFA. It completely misses the point. Sure, because brand new bleeding edge phones have higher performance, Ouya (at #70) is a loser. Good grief. It is a certainty that there will be between 100 and 1000 PCs (and Macs) of varying configurations from reasonable manufacturers that will exceed the PS4 and Xbox 720 when they are released (at #101-#1001). (at octo-core 1.6 GHz Jag and roughly half the performance of a 670 video card it won't be difficult). Does that mean that these consoles are failures and Sony and MS should give up?

Of course not. They will have defined a stable platform that is "good enough" for some years of gaming, along with interfaces to enable that.

Ditto, potentially, Ouya.

Will Ouya succeed? I've no idea, but the raw power of the console is unlikely to be a material issue at this point.

And the Ouya software still is entirely beta and will be for quite some time.

As anybody can attest: Android devices with not optimised/slimmed down system software can bevery sluggish. They have been performance testing at the wrong time and that is dishonest.

Also this hardly is news since Tegra3 is yesterdays news and has been surpassed for quite some time. Yet there are not many games that take it really to the edge. It's like claiming that the Geforce 680 has been surpassed by the latest ATI offering. That'd be interesting but of no particular value since nearly no games under normal circumstances strain either of them.

Re:800,000 Applications

[bfandreas]

Even the excellent Deus Ex where I absolutely took my time to finish it yielded only about 30 hrs of game time. When I look through my Steam library I find any game that I have finished has about the same play time on it as Bastion.

I've stopped buying AAA games. They are not good value for money and I will rather pick them up in a sale together with all DLC if at all.

There are 200 games in my Steam library. Only few of them have 60 hrs+ play time on them. One being Skyrim(most of which was spent trying out mods) and Warlock: Master of the Arcane(crap at release, excellent with the latest DLC) at 400 hrs played. Closely followed by the new XCOM and the first Orcs Must Die. Warlock and OMD did cost me a third of what Skyrim/XCOM did and are not considered AAA games. They propably cost a single digit percentile of what Skyrim/XCOM did to produce.

Why again do we have AAA games?

Also I would give a kidney for an XCOM Android port. An extra lung would be thrown in if they kept the art assests/FX intact and degraded them according to the hardware capabilities.

Re:And...

[dagamer34]

The raw part cost of a smartphone SoC is a tiny portion of the bill of materials (BOM), maybe 10-15%. CPU is maybe $30 at the very high end? So for a box like the OUYA where the CPU is probably the biggest cost and they don't have to worry about a display, camera, battery, cellular radios, or massive amounts of storage, they probably could have sprung for a Snapdragon 600 or Tegra 4. Only thing is it would have delayed the product by 6 months since those chips are in high demand from smartphone OEMs. Take a look at this cost breakdown analysis of the GS4: http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/News/Pages/Samsung-Galaxy-S4-Carries-236-Bill-of-Materials-IHS-iSuppli-Virtual-Teardown-Reveals.aspx $236 worth of parts selling for $699 just shows you how things are roughly priced (granted, MSRP - BOM != profit, but Samsung is in a pretty good position). Also you'll learn the biggest conspiracy of smartphones ever: it does NOT cost $100 to go from 16GB NAND to 32GB, or 32->64, or 64->128.

Better than SNES or PSX

[Kevin Fishburne]

If it can power games anything like A Link to the Past and Symphony of the Night at 1080p then it'll do just fine. The only thing that worries me is the possibility of a metric ton of bad games combined with a lack of great ones like my examples. We'll all find out soon enough.

Non-misleading headline

[Enderandrew]

The benchmark results show the OUYA (basically a $50 console bundled with a $50 controller) was faster than the HTC One S, which sells for $450 outside of a contract.

Silly headline--the performance is plenty exciting

[fluke11]

What makes the Ouya exciting is it's ability to play games and it's performance exceeds several existing platforms which have worked fine for playing games. Ouya is ranked 73rd because of it's score of 4077. This beats the following popular platforms (score/name): 3551 ASUS Nexus 7 3569 ASUS Transformer Pad TF300T 3920 ASUS Transformer Prime TF201 3347 Samsung Galaxy Note II 2894 Samsung Galaxy S III (Exynos 4 Quad) 3590 HTC One X 3341 LG Optimus 4X HD 3501 Amazon Kindle Fire HD 1959 Amazon Kindle Fire If the Ouya ends up being restricted to only be able to play the same sort of games already available for the following devices above, it is still exciting for being able to bring them to the TV for $99. It is unlikely that Gamestick will perform any better.

so?

[shentino]

Did they use Gamecube quality hardware in the NES?

Give Ouya a break, it's a brand new console and it's only on its first generation.

Give the makers time to soak up some feedback on Ouya's weak points and the next version will probably be beefed up a bit.

Re:It's about content not specs.

[tepples]

The Master System had 8 times the video ram

True, but that's because the NES was designed to use video ROM or RAM in the cartridge. Plug Videomation into your NES and there's more video RAM than the SMS. Tile animation effects, such as the spinning ? blocks and spinning coins in SMB3, could be made much more elaborate in NES games whose mapper chip supported paged video ROM.

4 times the ram

This I'll give you: NES games with a highly destructible environment (such as SMB3) needed to have extra working memory on the cartridge at $6000-$7FFF. But games with a battery save feature often got this for free, as they could dedicate about half a KiB to battery save and the rest to expanded working memory.

a much faster CPU

Let me guess: You fell for the megahertz myth in the Pentium 4 days. A 6502 CPU has about twice the IPC of a Z80.