I’m interested in making 3D graphics for the upcoming OUYA platform. I am basically a beginner and not familiar with the performance abilities of the OUYA’s equipment, since I don’t own any Android devices with similar technology and my previous experience is mostly pre-renders. Would it handle Blade n Soul type graphics, or should I stick to Grand Chase or GetAmped style? Is it better to use extensive geometry or normal maps and transparent areas?
Tegra3 quad-core processor
1GB RAM
8GB of internal flash storage
HDMI connection to the TV, with support for up to 1080p HD
WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
Bluetooth LE 4.0
USB 2.0 (one)
Wireless controller with standard controls (two analog sticks, d-pad, eight action buttons, a system button), a touchpad
Android Jelly Bean
Ethernet
That’s the sort of thing I’ve heard a dozen times about OUYA and it doesn’t tell me anything because I don’t know what the nexus 7 or any other tablet or smart phone handles.
If you develop for devices like that, what kind of 3D models and textures would you look for?
I did look up the popular android games and saw Dead Trigger, Avengers Initiative and Shadowgun. The quality looks a bit more detailed than PSP games or maybe on par with certain Game Cube games. And I know that Square is porting their DS FF3 to OUYA, but that’s a very odd graphical style to begin with.
Hi AceSV - Raffi here from OUYA. Dreamora is right, though OUYA will perform (rather, is performing) better than a Nexus 7. For comparisons, I’d recommend checking out games such as Horn or Shadowgun, which you mentioned. Also, we’re going to start shipping dev consoles late next week and will be opening up our developer portal, so you can start developing using our OUYA Developer Kit… I’m sure you’ll start hearing more about OUYA’s capabilities directly from our developers (on our boards forums) who will be testing on actual devices.
I’d also like to know some tech specs for the hardware… like pixel fill rate, polygons/second, what kind of optimizations you have to do like avoiding alpha testing shaders or using more polygons or others iOs-like approaches that need to be different than for normal desktop apps. Is there a slowdown problem with lots of overdraw like on iOs? Are shaders better off using smaller datatypes? what texture sizes are supported? how fast can you upload new texture data over the bus? what Unity features are/are not supported, etc?
Doing a bit of research… seems Tegra 3 could be considered somewhere around iPad2 performance or just under?.. although the fill rate is only around half of the iPad2’s fill rate (~450mp/sec vs ~900mp/sec). Seems also the Tegra 3 cpu portion is quite capable, around as fast or slightly better than iPad2 cpu plus it’s quad core + an extra core. So overall maybe we can say around 75% the overall performance of iPad2? But that doesn’t take into account Ouya’s Tegra 3 being overclocked, so perhaps we can say it’s around the same spec as iPad2 overall? With Ouya’s 1920x1080 display resolution I think that might gobble up a fair amount of the ~450,000,000 texels/second fill rate, yielding perhaps around 3 screenfulls of pixel fill at 60hz, which if I remember rightly was roughly the number of screens you can fill on iPad 1 at 60hz? So shall we say… if you run at 1080p you may have 3 screens/frame of fill rate, and if you run at 720p (is that possible) it could be 3-4 times that. Not taking into account polygon performance etc and other factors. But I can’t seem to find any real hard specs on the Tegra 3 beyond basic test results people have run.
So probably targetting iPad2-like performance may be fairly safe? And on a console like this obviously there’s going to need to be some optimization and clever use of cheaper techniques for producing effects, just like developing for early iPads.
Hey man, just a small comment, it might help you, please don’t take it the wrong way:
don’t worry about this stuff at them moment, from your other threads it seems you don’t have a solid
concept yet.
From what I’ve seen the various tablets handle, I don’t think the device will be the
bottleneck in a 10 day jam or an indie game in general. The xbox360 has 512mb of memory
in total.
I do have a game design/concept I just haven’t let on what it is … but I do need to store a lot of texture data in memory so that’s why I’m asking. For now I’m going to assume to stay within the 1/2gb realm. Once the thing is up and running and I have the actual console to test it on I can find out for sure if I can go bigger.
I dunno anything about max texture sizes or memory, since I haven’t tried pushing the system that way - my biggest texture has been 2048x2048, of which I only had one of those loaded at a time (and all my textures are compressed). But speed-wise, with my dev kit my game with 40-60 draw calls gets 50-60fps at 720p, 30-40fps at 1080p. At 300 draw calls it was less than half that speed.
Compared to other devices, the OUYA is currently exactly the same speed as a Asus Transformer Infinity TF700, which is quite a bit faster than a Nexus 7 due to using the Tegra 3 T33 instead of the Tegra 3 T30.
mmm Thanks good to know… seems draw calls are still as much of an issue as ever. I’m aiming for 1080p at 60hz if possible.
From what I found elsewhere, maximum texture size is 2048, and there are 16 texture units. You should be able to draw around 4-5 full screens of fillrate at 60hz. If anyone has time or inclination it would be interesting to know if how many 2048x2048 textures (uncompressed ARGB) you can use at once before hitting a crash or memory limit.
… but I do need to store a lot of texture data in memory so that’s why I’m asking. For now I’m going to assume to stay within the 1/2gb realm. Once the thing is up and running and I have the actual console to test it on I can find out for sure if I can go bigger.