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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.
As the early Nintendo days can attest.
I think it is far more interesting that it scored higher than the majority of other tegra 3 devices which cost far more. I never really expected it to be performance impressive by the time it shipped. It is running on a 1 year old chip.
Of course it is going to be outpaced by the newer devices.
So? This thing was never meant to be a PS4. The OUYA has my attention for several reasons: 1.) It's a kickstarter project and I hope it's successful for the sake of those that bet so much on it. 2.) It's cheap - consoles are never this inexpensive. The Wii was cheap, but the controllers were ungodly expensive (granted, the OUYA controllers aren't that cheap either). 3.) It's open. This is perhaps most important. I had more fun hacking a Wii and turning into an emulator box and a media streamer than I've ever had with my old, dusty Xbox 360. If I can do that with the blessing of the company who's box I just purchased, hell yes I'll buy one.
A lot of the the new, popular indie games available aren't exactly taxing on system requirements. Granted some of them could stand a bit of optimization, but having a common framework and a fixed hardware target (exacly what the Ouya provides) really will help there.
I've got a nice overclock sandy bridge i5 and a high end video card in my gaming system. While I enjoy many of the newer A-list titles with all of their eye candy, I probably put a lot more gaming hours in to titles like minecraft (mostly mod packs like tekkit or FTB), binding of issac, don't starve, super meat boy, and a lot of others that can be had for a couple of bucks on steam.
While not the fastest thing in the world, I still think the ouya could put a lot of very good games in to the hands of eager players for a very good price. The big console makers miss the mark on indie titles, requiring way too much money for development and focusing way too heavily on monitization at the expense of gameplay.
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.
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.
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Ouya competes with non-hyped Android sticks. I just got $50 MK808B and Neo G4 ($75) and X5 ($100, but more I/O) sticks that I'm setting up to do Skype, Internet, email... and games... for friends and family. Dual-core A9, 1GB RAM, 8GB Flash, 2x or 3xUSB, BT, Wifi, Android 4.1 (4.2 on the way), SD slot, HDMI (and SPDIF for the X5)... and the full Android PlayStore,which Ouya and GameStick don't offer.
Add a $50 gamepad (a really good one, xbox or DualShock), any old keyboard and mouse, or a Logitech K400 if you want to get fancy, and you get something that can play almost as well as the Ouya/Gamestick, and do a whole lot more thanks to the PlayStore.
There aren't a whole lot of games that support gamepads or kb+ms, and quite a few games won't run at all because of lack of touch/accelerometer/gyroscope, and the portrait mode... but there are still quite a few good games, a whole bunch of emulators... and this is a lot more than what the OuyaSticks have right now. And there's a good chance that OuyaStick games will find their way to the PlayStore, too, devs would be crazy not to port them: very little extra work, a way bigger market.
I think it all comes down to the games: if Ouya or GameStick not only catch up to the PlayStore but snag good, exclusive games, it might be worth pay as much for them as for a true Android device, in spite of Ouya/GameStick being as expensive, more limited, and having bad controllers.
And quad-cores are on the way for less than $100.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Big point missed: it's supposidly built to run XBMC really well. It does have multiple purposes.
In fact the only problem it has is making out the quality from the...not so quality
Which is not a problem we should dismiss out of hand. The exact same problem killed Atari (and the American video game market with it) back in the 80s. When the NES was introduced, Nintendo had some pretty strict quality/quantity control to prevent that from happening again, as well as its own magazine to inform gamers about what was available. Perhaps aggregate reviews on the internet will fulfill the same function today.
Visit the
The OUYA is a self-contained computer. It is only missing a display.
You also have to consider that an OUYA with a controller is $100, and that a controller by itself is $50. So this is basically a $50 self-contained computer. I expect the performance to match/or exceed that of other $50 self-contained computers.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
Yes, but what you're forgetting about is the opportunity cost. If you can make a $100 device that competes equally with a $300 device simply by lowering your profit margin, that's not the whole picture. To design and start producing that device, you need funding. That capital typically comes from people who want a return on their investment, and lower risk. The smaller your profit margin, the closer you are to not being profitable at all if you miscalculated, incorrectly estimated, or failed to account for something. And even if you hit exactly your intended margin, you still end up providing a lower return on investment than if you had charged more...or, in this case, if you lower the hardware costs. Also, keep in mind that a $5 hardware cost difference matters less, profit-wise, on a $300 device than it does on a $100 device.
Hardware isn't designed and built in a vacuum; these things happen in the context of a business, as well as in the context of an entire industry.
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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.
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.
Sadly, the rule with games available on Android...is that they're almost all terrible. There are very few exceptions.
Except that is not even remotely true, having owned a Android game console for over 18 months, its my primary source of gaming, and the costs are cheap too. Android is becoming the primary gaming platform.
Face it, you can't have great, immersive, polished, professional-quality games for $2.99
Ignoring the fact that you have not looked at Google Play recently :) Lets spend a little time looking at costs.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2010/02/anatomy-of-a-60-dollar-video-game.html
These figures are rough and back in 2010 by Steve Perlman, founder of OnLive That bring the cost of a video game down to $27. For your $2.99 Andoird game the developers pay $25 for registration to distribute on the Google Play Store. Application developers receive 70 percent of the application price...leaving you with $2.09
A quick look at the console market http://www.vgchartz.com/ and consoles average about 80M potential customers at the end of a consoles useful life. Android is Heading towards 1Billion activations, and continue to grow [currently only 12.5x larger than Consoles].
I am making no claims that more money can be made from Android games than tradition console gaming, but comparing on total selling price alone is foolish when Android market is massive and continues to growl; there is no second hand market; risks are smaller; development costs cheaper; Customers buy more games; Alternative revenue streams.
That is ignoring the fact that your favourite engine spits out binaries that will work on a plethora of platforms...Look at Unity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_(game_engine)
With the exception of Skyrim, very few (if any) games have actually delivered more than 10 solid hours of gameplay, much less 20. If you can name me 5 games from this list that are both a console game and 20+ hours of gameplay, I'd be really surprised.
Bits of code, random ramblings: jakimfett.com
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.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
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.
20 minutes into the future