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Comment by personZ | Hacker News Reader

How is the simple inclusion of the feature the "worst aspect"? You don't have to play games on the device, of course. They didn't force the controller with the base purchase. Given that it's Android powered, I suspect they didn't have to spend much engineering effort on making it capable of playing games.

Also, don't sell mobile gaming short. There are current generation mobile chipsets capable of PS3 level graphics (especially given that many smartphones now have a resolution greater than that big television), and in this case they don't even have to live within the power bounds of a battery power deviced, opening up the high end (they claim it's a "dedicated" GPU, which is an odd phrasing in the era of SoCs).

PS3 level graphics are beyond satisfactory for a huge range of gaming genres (especially given that many of the PS3s limitations were courtesy of the 256MB/256MB memory limit).

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As a more than casual android gamer I'm not sure I would call the graphics ps3 quality. Perhaps on a small screen some of these games look nice (like modern combat series and nova) but when playing on a tv at 1080p the lack of definition of textures and overall quality is very aparent.

mobile games are much closer to ps2. Gta3 was released for ps2 and now runs on android. My experience with gta3 wasn't a smooth one, although maybe a galaxy s5 would have a more consistent/smoother experience.

I feel like we have a ways before we get to true ps3 graphics. But I also agree not to discredit mobile games. For the price (about $140) and all the other benefits you recieve from the streaming video offerings, doesn't seem like a bad deal to me.

Well, PS2 with much higher definition. That's part of the problem comparing Android gaming graphics to consoles... they're high-definition but comparable to SD-era consoles like the Wii and PS2.

I was speaking more to the capabilities of the hardware than specific games or apps, and it is absolutely true that most games optimize for the lower end (in vertex count and texture size), so they don't really show off the high end. As higher end hardware becomes more commonplace the standard moves up, especially for things like models and textures that are simply resources that can vary.

In this case while I was hoping it would be something really compelling like a Tegra K1, it's a 1.7Ghz quad-core Krait 300 APQ8064 with Adrena 320 graphics. That pushes about 225 million triangles per second, while the PS3 pushes 275 million. The PS2 pushed about 35 million. Of course triangles per second is an entirely incomplete metric, though the PS3 and the Snapdragon feature similar memory bandwidth (and fill rate), though the PS3 has dedicated video memory while the Snapdragon shares it with the CPU.

Overhead of Android and OpenGL ES eats into this significantly of course, but the fact that such a comparison is at all viable is pretty incredible.

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