Can your Tegra 2 handle SL?

[kamikazees]

I asked this question kinda off-topic in another thread and no one responded, so I thought I'd give it a proper standalone thread. If you have a device with a Dual Core (or Tegra 2) chip, I'd like to know... can you play Star Legends?

I have a Motorola Atrix with a 1.0 Gz dual core Tegra 2 chip and 1 GB of ram, and the game plays really choppy when there are large enemies or lots of enemies on the screen. It's really strange and does not happen in town. My iPhone 4 and iPad 2 play it just fine in town or battle, but I'd rather play on the Atrix. Hoping to figure out a solution.

EDIT: Highlight link for those interested.

[apoceq]

Man I dont have a Tegra 2 but a TIOMAP4 or whatever comes in the droid bionic...I havent tested it out on SL yet...but PL runs BAD BAD BAD!! Fine in town....but when casting and moving with mobs on the screen its terrible!

[apoceq]

Ok i just played SL, and I get the same choppy performance. UGH. So frustrating...

[StompArtist]

I have an old G-Tablet with Tegra2 chip and it runs great but the tablet has been flashed with a custom ROM (Vegan)

[Growwle]

X2 still lags a bit in SL, but PL runs beautifully since last patch lucky there is nothing for me to do in SL until Sloucho.

[Deathpunch]

The dual core Qualcomm Snapdragon in my HTC Evo 3D handles this game smoothly. No gameplay issues at all. One very minor incident involving text changed to white boxes, but it corrected itself when I snapped the screen cap to report it. Not real sure if that was a CPU issue or something with the Adreno 220 GPU. It wouldn't be the first game I've played that had issues with the GPU. Battleheart would crash until it was updated with support for it.

[WhoIsThis]

An older ARM Cortex A8 CPU can play it fine. The Tegra as a dual core is significantly faster, although the graphics don't represent much of an upgrade over the PowerVR SGX 540.

I suspect that the issue is probably with the Atrix itself. The phone was very buggy on release.

[Growwle]

SL ran fine on my x2 through beta up until combos were added and spell effects were upgraded around the time Numa was released.

[Zaltiar]

I use an asus transformer tegra dual core tablet, games working fine for me, hardly get lags.

[kamikazees]

Thanks to everyone so far for your posts. I keep wondering if it is just my phone, but several other people, like apoceq and Growwle, are reporting the same problems. But then there are others who have the Tegra 2 (like the ASUS eee pad Transformer users) who don't have this problem. Maybe there is something else we all have in common that's not the Tegra 2 but is the problem.

It really sounds like an issue that affected Android users in Alien Oasis several months back, as I found reported in this similar thread. Unfortunately, I did not see any resolution to that thread and I have similar (although not quite as bad) problems in PL.

This weekend, I rooted and unlocked my phone, wiped everything on it and flashed an entirely new Rom (OS) to the phone. I flashed the Alien Rom v. 4 and theme. My phone is now optimized and superfast, running the Alien/Gingerbread OS.... and Star Legends still kicks it butt. My iPhone 3gs is laughing.

I may try freezing some applications or services next, flashing other roms, over overclocking the CPU. I am running out of ideas though.

[Navygreen]

My tegra 2 chip seems to run PL and SL flawlessly... Of course on a wireless connection if that even makes any difference.

[WhoIsThis]

In theory, we would actually expect the Tegra 2 to be slower on tablets because of higher 1280x800 resolution. This is not the case based off the (subjective) opinions of users.

I do recall that when the Atrix was released in Canada and I played with it in stores, it subjectively felt significantly slower than my Samsung Galaxy S variant, despite having an ARM Cortex A9 processor that is about 30% faster clock for clock (and that isn't even taking into account that the Tegra 2 is dual core).

I recommend trying to flash other ROMs at this point. Motorola does a pretty terrible job of coding to be honest. Samsung isn't too great either. See if there are any AOSP or Cyanogenmod based ROMs out there.

[kamikazees]

I recommend trying to flash other ROMs at this point...

Darn, I was really hoping you wouldn't say that. I am new to flashing and it took me forever to research it enough to where I felt I had minimized my chances of bricking my phone. So far Alien is still running smoothly and quickly. It still has a lot of Motoblur in it, though. Maybe that is my culprit.

There is a Cyan based ROM called CM7 that is in version 3 pre-beta or something. I think there is an AOSP based one called RedPill. I will give those a try and report back.

[WhoIsThis]

Samsung, despite its poor coding of Touchwiz (and I'm talking about the UI here, I'm talking about the underlying stuff), has done a pretty good job of making it easy for geeks to flash ROMs. It seems to be the easiest of the manufacturers to root, unlock the bootloader, and pretty much to do nifty stuff. LG seems to be modder friendly as well.

I don't have that much experience with Motorolas, but from I hear, it is easier to brick your phone. Careful with the HTCs as well (depends on the model and method used). Samsung has done a pretty good job of making their phones "brick resilient". Always remember to use something like Titanium Backup or Nandroid. Plus Motorola's bootloader policy isn't helping.


Edit:
I wouldn't go with anything pre-beta unless you are reasonably sure of its stability and usually pre-betas have something not working (camera, GPS, RIL, etc.). That said, Motorola does such a terrible job of coding that pre-betas are often vastly faster in performance (you'll find them much smoother at times) than anything stock-based. Be sure to check if your ROM is stock based (usually the worse performance although some modders can do things to speed it up), or AOSP (or an AOSP derivative like Cyanogen) based. From personal experience, I have found MIUI ROMs to be less stable, but it will depend on the phone and usually some phones are better supported.

[kamikazees]

....remember to use something like Titanium Backup or Nandroid....Be sure to check if your ROM is stock based (usually the worse performance although some modders can do things to speed it up), or AOSP (or an AOSP derivative like Cyanogen) based.....

All good advice. I've got several backups of the roms at all stages, so my main concern is not losing data, but bricking the phone. I flashed from Alien v.4 to CM7 pre-beta 3 a few hours ago. Wow. It's a Cyan based rom, and there's no trace of Motoblur. I didn't even log into my Motoblur account, and there are no Blur services. It's also incredibly fast (1.1Gz dual core); my phone has benchmarks as high as the Samsung Galaxy S2 now. It's awesome. Of course, Star Legends still has choppy framerates. Smack!

What to do... There are two roms left I haven't tried (Atrix just had its bootloader unlocked about a month and a half ago). I'll give RedPill a try. The other one, Ninja, hasn't been updated in awhile and is Blur based. They say it's stable and fast, but I'm not sure I'll bother with it at this point.

The good news is that I really liked the CM7 even though it is still in pre-beta and didn't fix my SL problems. Unless I fall in love with RedPill, I may stick with CM7 when all is said and done. Will report back.

EDIT: RedPill successfully installed... and Star Legends has choppy framerates. So this problem is something no current software changes can fix. It's either a hardware problem (our phones) or a Spacetime issue.

[apoceq]

Devs we need help please. I cant play any maps due to lag..

[WhoIsThis]

All good advice. I've got several backups of the roms at all stages, so my main concern is not losing data, but bricking the phone. I flashed from Alien v.4 to CM7 pre-beta 3 a few hours ago. Wow. It's a Cyan based rom, and there's no trace of Motoblur. I didn't even log into my Motoblur account, and there are no Blur services. It's also incredibly fast (1.1Gz dual core); my phone has benchmarks as high as the Samsung Galaxy S2 now. It's awesome. Of course, Star Legends still has choppy framerates. Smack!

What to do... There are two roms left I haven't tried (Atrix just had its bootloader unlocked about a month and a half ago). I'll give RedPill a try. The other one, Ninja, hasn't been updated in awhile and is Blur based. They say it's stable and fast, but I'm not sure I'll bother with it at this point.

The good news is that I really liked the CM7 even though it is still in pre-beta and didn't fix my SL problems. Unless I fall in love with RedPill, I may stick with CM7 when all is said and done. Will report back.

EDIT: RedPill successfully installed... and Star Legends has choppy framerates. So this problem is something no current software changes can fix. It's either a hardware problem (our phones) or a Spacetime issue.

I don't know what tools you are using, but the Tegra 2 is substantially slower than the Galaxy S2's Exynos (both in CPU and GPU), which currently has the fastest SOC for a smartphone on the market and the second fastest GPU (after the SGX 543MP2 on the A5 of the iPad 2). Quadrant, BTW is an incredibly unreliable benchmarking tool.

Cyanogenmod is generally considered the fastest and most stable of the Android derivatives. It's entirely possible that hardware acceleration was not enabled on your phone or is not working 100%. As for which ROM, do be careful about which ROMs. A lot of these custom third party ROMs are coded by well, inexperienced people who are putting together their first ROM.

Pure Speculation below:
It is probably a hardware problem or driver problem then (I'd bet drivers, but I don't know enough on the situation to speculate; drivers would be my guess because the hardware is theoretically powerful enough to run everything smoothly given well optimized drivers and phone software). If it were an STS software problem, we'd expect this problem to manifest itself on a variety of Tegra 2-based and Motorola-based phones. Phones from the same manufacturer or using the same SOC should share some similar parts and code. So far, nobody has posted serious lagging problems on any other Tegra 2 device. In particular, we are interested in other Motorola based Tegra 2 such as the Droid X2 and Photon.

Other thoughts:
I'd keep the Cyanogenmod if I were you, unless there is something not working that you need. Right now I use a beta build of Cyanogenmod on my phone as well. Cyanogen generally is much more responsive and faster. Depending on the device and what you do, it may also extend the battery life. As I mentioned before, manufacturers generally do an awful job of ROM writing. To be honest, it's sad that given the vast disparity of resources, they can be outdone regularly by a bunch of college students.

Personally, now that I have gotten used to Cyanogenmod, I really don't want to go back to a non-supported device. I'm thinking that Cyanogen support with dictate my future phone purchases.
http://www.cyanogenmod.com/devices

As much as I like having the latest and greatest, Cyanogen to me has become something of a make or break. For my next phone, I am strongly leaning in favor of the Nexus Series, even though I prefer (and currently own) a phone with a physical keyboard. The trend seems to be moving away from physical keyboards fast.

[WhoIsThis]

Update:

Apparently Apoceq above has a Droid Bionic.

http://www.spacetimestudios.com/show...ormance-issues


Seeing that somebody I know has an LG Optimus 2X (also Tegra 2) ran SL smoothly and an above poster noted that the Asus Transformer worked perfectly (although strictly speaking it uses the Tegra 250 T20 vs the Tegra 250 AP20H on phones) was fine, this suggests that there is something with Motorola phones in particular.

I won't draw any conclusions as we need a bigger sample size. Anybody with a Droid 3? A Photon? A Droid X2? How does SL run?

Also of interest is the Xoom which uses the same Tegra 2 as other tablets.








Finally, to anybody reading this, I suspect (again pure speculation here) that there may not be much that STS can do on this end - the problem may originate from Motorola itself unless the root cause of the problem is different than what I suspect it to be (and there is a very high probability that I am wrong, especially because there's very little information to work with here).

[apoceq]

Yes I do have a brand spanking new Bionic...And PL runs absolutley terrible on it...it even LOOKS terrible compared to my samsung galaxy. Someone had mentioned that the screen has something to do with the grainy and pixelated appearance...but if that was the case why does dungeon defenders looks absolutley AMAZING on it??

PS the bionic has a OMAP processor.

[kamikazees]

...So far, nobody has posted serious lagging problems on any other Tegra 2 device. In particular, we are interested in other Motorola based Tegra 2 such as the Droid X2 and Photon.

Flowman and bubble reported having the same problems on the Droid X2 and the Photon, in this thread.

So maybe now we are speculating that this issue is a Motorola issue? Is there a way to update drivers? What else can I try?

I went back to CM7 yesterday after RedPill did nothing to correct my problem. CM7, as best I can tell, deblurs the phone but the problems still persist in SL.

Oh, and I used CF Bench to test my phone, which with CM7 registers right under the Galaxy S2. I can see the numbers where the Galaxy S2 does score a little bit higher, but it's funny to see that my phone is now 2 categories above the stock Motorola Atrix. Not sure how accurate that is, but I can tell subjectively that it is way faster than the stock ever was.

And thanks for your input, WhoIsThis. I am very new to Android (2 months) but am already a huge fan. Not so much of Motorola...

EDIT: And thanks to everyone else for posting too and keeping this feedback clean, simple and factual for the devs. Well, maybe not so simple once I started modding my phone, but hey, we're looking for a solution!