Monday, April 22, 2013

Ouya only places 73rd in 3DMark Ice Storm mobile benchmark


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Ouya developer kits started shipping out in December and everything looks on track for the retail launch later this year. But having hardware available to play with means we are starting to see exactly what the tiny games console is actually capable of in terms of performance, and it’s not great news depending on your viewpoint.
James Coote of games studio Crystalline Green was one of the developers who got an Ouya dev kit. He and his team are developing the game Executive Star for the Ouya, but wanted to see what kind of performance the hardware could achieve using one of the most well known benchmarking suites: 3DMark.
So, Coote got in touch with Futuremark, who obliged by providing him with a copy of 3DMark Ice Storm, which has been created specifically to test mobile device performance. You can see the video of 3DMark Ice Storm running on Coote’s Ouya below:
Just watching it as a demo video it looks pretty impressive, but the end result and overall score isn’t great. Ouya scores 4084 and comes in 73rdin the 3DMark rankings. That puts it well behind a Galaxy S3, the Nexus 4 and Nexus 10, but well ahead of the Nexus 7.
On the face of it that doesn’t seem to bode too well for the console, but I’d argue it probably doesn’t matter all that much at the moment. Remember, this is a $99 games console, and one that will havehundreds of games available at launch many of which already look and run great on much lower spec Android phones and tablets. Ouya really isn’t about performance and shouldn’t be judged as such like the $500+ consoles always are when they launch.
The Ouya performance is middling at best, but at $99 it’s good enough and lets not forget we are expecting yearly hardware refreshes that should cost less than the $99 you paid to get the original while bringing large gains in performance.

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