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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.
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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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.