So I am wondering about the plausibility of normal mapping a game in Android. I know atleast opengl es 2.0 supports it, but has anyone tried a game that uses normal mapping on an android device? How fast does it run? I imagine the earlier android phones couldnt run it fast at all, but what about a phone like galaxy s with that fancy powervr gpu? Anyone try normal mapping on something comparable to that?
earlier can’t run it at all as they aren’t OpenGL ES 2.0
The android market unpleasantly still has a rather undesirefull amount of devices that are not OGL ES 2.0, with even several successful ones being released in 2010 and sold up to today and thus in active usage.
There were even devices sold in 2010 that would barely stand a chance against the original iphone 2G game performance wise if the game is graphically taxing and not pure cpu bound.
Its a shame that Google still does not get the requirement of reducing the fragmentation and decided to not make the hardware specs mentioned for 3.0 requirements but guidelines, thus inviting the trash hardware pushers in even with 3.0. Made and makes me considerably rethinking my standing towards android as a platform for game development as google is doing their best to make the situation significantly worse all 6 months.
There MS and Apple are lightyears ahead by killing out devices that are just not even remotely current anymore and significantly kill any media application.
Performance wise the different OGL ES 2.0 chips are definitely up to the task.
Also normalmapping is not exactly costly, the costly thing is the light itself and the consequences it has on potentially required redraws etc (-> drawcalls)
Normal mapping works, you’ll notice a distinct lack of games in the market with normal mapping.
You can read a lot into that.
These devices have a lot of pixels compared to SD TV, it takes a fair bit of gpu grunt to normal map that amount of pixels.
You guys done any tests though?
Like if you stick a 256x256 normal map onto cube than run it onscreen, how much does it slower does it go compared to a non-normal mapped 256x256 texture on a cube?
I do not have an android device to test this, which is why I ask the forum.
I am currently developing a game that will be first released on PC, and maybe web player. But eventually I want to put it on android. I want to use normal mapping as a central role in how my game looks, but I’m curious to know how well normal mapping goes on the OGL ES 2.0 android devices, because if android can’t do it well, I want to avoid normal mapping from the begining.
on a single cube you won’t see a difference normally on the fps, at worst 0.1ms on the frame time.
but you will normally also not only have a single cube normalmapped but everything.
also keep in mind that normalmap means pixel light and pixel light means many more drawcalls as every object affected by a pixel light is redrawn once for each pixellight affecting it (so even if all batches down to 1 drawcall, the pixel lights will still add up on top of it, no batching possible there at all)