The Tablet Test: iPad mini vs Android Nexus 7, featuring Modern Combat 4: Zero Hour

Steve3000 | 21:17 - 13 January 2013

Possibly the most meaningless test ever, why use Gameloft Junkware which is shoddily dragged onto Tegra to cash in? Dead Trigger would have been a better bet as it's actually optimised for Tegra. In fact anything not by Gameloft would have been a better bet..... Note to Mark - Madfinger=Good Developer, Gameloft=Sh1tty Developer.

Well done, you've just wasted a little bit of the internet. Should have put up a picture of a cat instead.

@patrickliu | 02:11 - 8 January 2013

I'm not surprised about the result, unless gameloft release a THD version of MC4

Funem | 15:58 - 7 January 2013

They could have just badly coded the android version.

Example, Zen pinball on android does not run in enhanced graphics mode for my Nexus 7 but does on my Galaxy S3. The game was originally written for tegra devices so go figure on that one.

It is not the hardware its the porting of the app/game that is at fault.

@MidianGTX | 15:56 - 7 January 2013

Exactly, llnond. And that is why Android gaming sucks. If you're into games, it doesn't matter how powerful the hardware is. It could outshine the sun, but if the games look and perform like crap, it's useless.

llnond | 15:32 - 7 January 2013

Allow me to copy and paste what someone said from the last "test"

"It is one thing to compare tablet hw capability, and an entirely different thing to compare a game that has been optimized for these two platforms/devices to different degrees. You can have a 3x faster device that still runs a game slower and with worse graphics than the 3x slower device. It's all up to how the game has been optimized for that device, and in this case also that platform/OS. I used to struggle with this stuff back in the days when working for Futuremark, and faced the same hurdle now at Remedy when porting Death Rally from iOS to Android.

The iOS versions of games are more likely to be further optimized than Android versions for the simple reason that the hardware variety is smaller. Unlike the previous comments, game speed is more up to graphics performance than CPU. All iOS devices use IMG GPUs, and all higher end such have the same SGX54x generation. Optimize for this hw and you'll have a faster running game on a very high percentage of all devices out there. On Android you can optimize for Tegra 3, but then there are the IMG devices, Qualcomm, ARM Mali etc etc. It's just not worth it from a business perspective to make the same polish for all Android devices on the market. iOS devices are therefore likely to win all this kind of comparisons, but it does not necessarily mean that the hw would be better."