Stuttery, poor framerate on Galaxy S4

[MontanaFrank]

I did the nenamark version 2 and averaged a 55.3 fps after 4 attempts with the lowest at 55.2.

I am perfectly happy the way my tf300t runs pinballarcade. Maybe because the tablet is only has a 720p resolution. Every once in awhile I get a stuttering rate,but that usually happens after I restart a paused game.

I am very happy the way TPA plays on my Android device. I know most of this discussion is about an Android phone; however I just wanted to say Android and TPA make a great pair for me.

Am I missing something?

 

[Dutch Pinball ball]

Lol, this is a forum, not a service centre.

 

[Baron Rubik]

I've already disabled Power Saving and Location Services

The Location services battery consumption issue I warned you about seems to have been fixed with the last 'Maps' update on the 11th.
The 'whats new' only said bug fixes, but I turned it back on just to test and haven't had the issue for the 3 days since.

 

[McGuirk]

I still have a Galaxy S II (Sprint), two generations before the current S4. Bride of Pinbot and Funhouse brought a lot of framerate issues to TPA on the device, and I was very disappointed by it. It made me look into different kernel options and ways to try and optimize the experience. It sort of worked, while it wasn't as smooth as my brother's iPad (2 or 3), it was serviceable. I bought a Nexus 7 last October and have barely played TPA on my phone since. I've reinstalled Blu Kuban a few times on my phone to try and refresh it, and just yesterday switched to Slim Bean, and have done this without reinstalling TPA. The tablet experience has eclipsed that of the phone. And now I have G.I.Joe Battleground, so that with my new job and married life, I'm playing TPA less.

However, I'm encountering more framerate issues on the N7. And yes, a good part of it probably has to do with the many different Android devices, the ones out now and the ones yet to come. At the time, the Tegra 3 was supposed to be (allegedly) the best chip for TPA, and by now it's probably not quite enough to keep performance at 60fps. Champion Pub and Whirlwind suffer from lag every so often. Pausing and resuming does help. But I wish there was a more consistent experience.

The S4 and the HTC One are supposed to be the two flagship devices for Android right now. So to read about issues on both these devices is disappointing. I may upgrade my tablet at some point, and maybe it will be even better at TPA, but I'm not sure I'm going back to TPA on the phone.

 

[Damianiw]

I still have a Galaxy S II (Sprint), two generations before the current S4. Bride of Pinbot and Funhouse brought a lot of framerate issues to TPA on the device, and I was very disappointed by it. It made me look into different kernel options and ways to try and optimize the experience. It sort of worked, while it wasn't as smooth as my brother's iPad (2 or 3), it was serviceable. I bought a Nexus 7 last October and have barely played TPA on my phone since. I've reinstalled Blu Kuban a few times on my phone to try and refresh it, and just yesterday switched to Slim Bean, and have done this without reinstalling TPA. The tablet experience has eclipsed that of the phone. And now I have G.I.Joe Battleground, so that with my new job and married life, I'm playing TPA less.

However, I'm encountering more framerate issues on the N7. And yes, a good part of it probably has to do with the many different Android devices, the ones out now and the ones yet to come. At the time, the Tegra 3 was supposed to be (allegedly) the best chip for TPA, and by now it's probably not quite enough to keep performance at 60fps. Champion Pub and Whirlwind suffer from lag every so often. Pausing and resuming does help. But I wish there was a more consistent experience.

The S4 and the HTC One are supposed to be the two flagship devices for Android right now. So to read about issues on both these devices is disappointing. I may upgrade my tablet at some point, and maybe it will be even better at TPA, but I'm not sure I'm going back to TPA on the phone.

Hmm unfortunately I think suggesting a faster device for what's sounding like a platform optimisation issue seems like Madness, if 2yr old iOS devices can run it then I'm wondering if its a case of resources to better develop and optimise, if Ryan's on his own he's doing a super job but did they only commit the same reasource to all other platforms.

Maybe its just like console development and it's easier to get optimised performance on other platforms than android :-( or maybe tegra3 etc really aren't as powerful as 2yr old apple offerings . I find the last suggestion unfathomable.

Sent from my IdeaTabA2109A using Tapatalk 4 Beta

 

[Indy99]

I would be very interested for Ryan to comment on this thread. I have never seen TPA on any platform besides Android. I usually play on my Nexys 7 tablet, and have on occasion played on my Galaxy Nexus phone. At times I have seen very stuttery perforance on occasion. I keep hearing how TPA runs consistantly very smooth on iOS. I would like to know if this is something Ryan plans to look at, or if it is a known behavior and probably the side effect of so many different Andorid devices and not really being able to optimize for it.

 

[netizen]

y'all are missing the very obvious thing that keeps getting stated over and over.

Android has Fragmentation of not just the OS but of the OEM OS Kernel and the Hardware instructions. 2 devices with the same hardware can have different instruction sets depending on the manufacturer. This makes for an extremely varied user experience, but also allows for a very open user experience.

Unless FS does what Zen did and limits development to a specific chipset, like say Tegra, then there will optimization issues. FS already has minimum requirement cutoffs.

Look at the Note 10/2 thread and Ryan's feedback on OpenGL instructions, or through some of the older Beta threads to see just how varied of an experience it can be.

 

[McGuirk]

or maybe tegra3 etc really aren't as powerful as 2yr old apple offerings . I find the last suggestion unfathomable.

Star Wars Pinball stutters on my Nexus 7 occasionally as well. I'm going to have to look into what's running in the background.

As far as a baseline for TPA to deal with the fragmentation in Android, I don't know if Farsight would consider that (or consider raising the bar a bit). The table packs bring in money.

 

[neilpinbot]

My Archos Tablet only runs at around 36 frames and doesn't have the best screen resolution, but I'm pretty pleased with how TPA runs on it, It runs quite smooth. I paid just under £150 for it a couple of years back apposed to £500 for an ipad so I don't expect it to look or perform as good as on a tablet that costs 3 times as much. But yes I think newer Androids probably need better optimization with TPA.

 

[Ryan Routon]

One of our team members will be getting an S4 soon and I can take a look at the thread monitor to see if something strange is happening (though for the life of me I can't figure out what that might be).

 

[Ryan Routon]

yeah the blurry textures are a result of the hardware not supporting anisotropic filtering. We can't do that software side it would be horrendously slow. Keep in mind I don't do anything special (aside from that filter that is) per device and the inner guts are similar to all platforms. I have spent a massive amount of time optimizing the render path on android using every trick in the book, but unfortunately it seems some devices stall at random intervals due to fill rate. Remember that tap is a very intense simulation and not many games out there can run this kind of overhead (emulation, physics, etc) while maintaining 60 frames. For instance, the nexus 10's massive display can stall with our game, the gpu just can't handle the calls sometimes. With the new devices it is never the cpu/game thread, its always the gpu thread that causes the stall.

That said I welcome constructive criticism otherwise I would never know if something crept in that could be slowing it. I will take some time to profile the path again when I can get my hands on one. I have an s3, but jason should be getting an s4 with an upgrade.

 

[Fer]

Gotta agree with Mark here. I've had TPA on an iPad2 and 4s since it came out and it is indeed much better than on the Android devices I've tried. Both the Nexus7 and Nexus4 had pretty terrible frame-rates in comparison, and they're pretty highly regarded devices. I was actually pretty shocked at the time. Now my brother likes pinball games and was the one who got the Nexus4. He took one look at the way TPA was running and basically dropped the idea of playing it. This is the problem Mark was raising. Calling him a troll because some artificial benchmarks say otherwise just makes you sound like a defensive fanboy. There is a major problem somewhere, either with the software or the OS.

 

[Damianiw]

Thanks very enlightening and as you say its a product of the open nature of android, different hardware, kernels etc

Ryan thanks for explaining as well

Sent from my IdeaTabA2109A using Tapatalk 4 Beta

 

[Fer]

Yes, it is interesting. Let's face it, there's a lot of Android devices out there loaded with some very tasty hardware now. It seems strange that the latest and greatest can't compete with pretty old IOS stuff. Something is not right. It kinda reminds me of the PC vs console thing. Better specs don't necessarily translate to better performing software.

 

[targa]

Hello,

The main problem on android is that some background processes seems to take priority over TPA. I had this issue with my gs4 (i9505) while i was playing TPA sometimes huge framerate drops would happen randomly. Only workaround to get framerate back was to hit pause in game. Now this issue is gone and TPA runs vey smooth. I was shocked when i read this thread because gs4 is a very fast beast

 

[Carl Spiby]

It's performance is probably sketchy cos it's loaded up with Samsung bloat.

If you root and install an AOSP 4.2 ROM, TPA will be smooth as silk, my Galaxy S still manages 60fps

 

[4P47HY]

I also had inconsistent and stutter framerate after recent Google Play Music updates on Note 2. This app started constantly running itself in the background. After uninstalling it's updates and disabling it everything went back to normal.

 

[Mark W**a]

You guys should maybe get this information into a consolidated thread, and list hacks or what have you that fixes the framerate on a device per device basis.

Because let's face it how many Android users who aren't in the know are just settling with crappy frame rates when their device is capable of so much more. How many users aren't that savvy and just think "oh, this is just how it is". So you'd be doing a great service. Close this thread and start one that actually helps people, I say.

 

[superballs]

I can objectively say that the Nexus 7 runs smooth as silk. I often film gameplay on it at 720p 60fps and routinely slow the footage down to 30fps and it still looks every bit as smooth.

There is an issue I've had on every mobile device, including ios (in fairness it was an outdated iphone4) where the frame rate just starts to stutter. On the iphone 4 it was mostly when an email notification or a text message would come in, and i would have to minimize and restore the game to resolve it.

I think performance on the S3 warrants some criticisms. But it was a step up for me from the Iphone4 (If I had had a 4S I might not have thought so). The lag in nudging (as I use shake) is horrible though. The same issue with frame dropping occurs though and the game becomes very choppy, but uniformly so. It's not like typical slowdown where it's varying degrees of slow as the hardware tries to keep up, it's like it's dropping frames due to lack of resources and it never gets them back.

Pausing the game and unpausing again (as long as it triggers the restarting countdown) returns the game to a smooth framerate.

The Nexus 7 does suffer from this frame dropping issue, but not nearly as often. Again, pausing and unpausing (unless the ball is at the plunger) solves the issue. There was a time when simply putting the ball on the lower playfield in Black Hole caused this (I just just tried this on my Note 2 and it doesn't seem to happen anymore)

The Note2 plays very well too, despite the issues with filtering that Ryan mentioned above, which don't really bother me anymore because usually when i'm playing, i'm too busy to play what I call "spot the pixel".

I've played briefly on an iPad mini (not sure which it was) and it did play very smoothly, but the shake nudging is unforgivable and that is one of my biggest pet peeves. The Note2 is, well not great but ok, the Nexus is mint in that regard, the iphone 4 and the SG3 were terrible.

 

[MarkItZeroSmoky]

I play on two Droid devices...my phone is a HTC evo 4g LTE with a 1.5GHz krait dual core snapdragon proccessor and 1gb of ram...my tablet is a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 with a 1.4GHz cortex quad core processor and 2gb of ram. I ran the Nena benchmark test app described on page 1 of this thread 4 times on each device. The evo averaged 57.7 fps and the note 10.1 averaged 58.6 fps.

I think the problem with droid phones is the crap it does in the background. After i turned off the location services like weather updates (uses gps), the auto-sync for accounts(gmail etc.) and the connection optimizer (constantly searches for best signal 3g, 4g, wifi) pretty much the only time i get stutter/frame drop is during an incoming text or phone call. i may get a slight drop when a table is lit up like a x-mas tree and i got multiball going and i clear a goal...but i get same thing sometimes on ps3, lol.

As for my note 10.1, i have never had an issue with stutter/frame drop. I was quite surprised to read that from the earlier post by spud. This tab is pretty powerful and its made to run multiple apps at once in a split screen mode...i havent even turned off any extra stuff like my phone & still i have no issues. the only thing i do is go into the task manager (hit the multiple squares button on the tool bar) and swipe close some of the open apps. Im not sure what else to tell ya spud, my note 10.1 runs smooth as silk.

Now for the blurry textures...yeah i definetly have that issue. I find it strange because some tables are fine, others not so bad, and a couple are just like wow. Wh20 is the worst. I have other games where i dont have any blurry te xtures at all, and a couple with minimal at worst. And not to disregard the issue, but its really only the textures in the distance...even if they were crystal clear i couldnt read the lettering anyway, being that they're usually tiny. And to quote superballs, im also too busy to play "spot the pixel" lol. Im hoping Ryan can figure out the issue with galaxy series though when he gets his hands on an s4.

I understand the op's thoughts here, but just turning off a few background things help. Overall im happy with both my devices. I know Ryan works hard to get us the best experience we can get on the droid, and he deserves alot of credit for his work.