Mario has arrived fashionably late to the iPhone party and no one is holding it against him. Such is Nintendo’s reputation for quality that many gamers are actually expecting this week’s launch of Super Mario Run to set a new standard for mobile gaming.

We’ve been using GameBench to find out whether Super Mario Run delivers the objective hallmarks of quality: Does the game run at a perfect, console-like 60fps? Does it make efficient use of system resources and battery power? And does Mario manage to keep up with his Sega rival, Sonic, who has already had a long career in the “endless runner” genre on smartphones? Read on to find out...

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• GameBench Staff
• 16. December 2016

• performance, game, testing, frame rate, fps, gamebench, mobile, power, battery, nintendo

• 0 Comments

Which of these two tasks is more likely to exceed the limits of your smartphone: checking your account balance on the HSBC app, or playing Angry Birds 2?GameBench makes it easy to discover the answer with just five minutes of testing on each application, and the results are surprising.

App vs. Game

Comparing a banking app with a game isn’t as strange as it might seem. The HSBC app and Angry Birds 2 have something important in common: they both aim to deliver the best possible visual responsiveness and smoothness, so they both target a graphical animation rate of 60 frames per second (fps).

Explainer: Frame rate objectively measures the smoothness of animations. Android and iOS applications generally target either 30fps or 60fps.

Of course, each application targets 60fps for a different reason. The HSBC app does it to ensure smooth scrolling and swiping, whereas Angry Birds does it make in-game physics appear more convincing. Nevertheless, frame rate is a key objective measurement of UX quality in both cases, so we figured it would be interesting to analyse them side-by-side.

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• GameBench Staff
• 04. October 2016
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There are many ways to test a mobile game, from compatibility testing through to subjective testing (i.e., determining whether it’s fun or not). But one aspect of the QA process that is still quite new, and hence doesn't always get the attention it deserves, is performance testing.

The need for performance testing has arisen in response to recent demand for more premium mobile game experiences -- in other words, games that deliver high levels of visual quality and fluidity, and which increasingly do so in combination with other intensive tasks (such as AR or VR, physics simulation or sophisticated AI).

Given the newness of this discipline, I think it’s worth pinning down an essential checklist of six common pain-points which we frequently encounter here at GameBench, and which any meaningful performance test should take into account.

1. Slow or jerky animation

When a studio sets a target frame rate for a game's animation, usually at either 30 or 60 frames per second (fps), it's essential that this target matches the game's genre and that it is achievable on popular devices.

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• GameBench Staff
• 04. October 2016

• gaming, tutorial, cpu, power consumption, frame rate, fps, Mobile Gaming, how-to, framerate, gpu, power

• 0 Comments

Mobile developers are frequently told that excessive battery drain is one of the key reasons why users abandon apps. But much less is said about how a developer can avoid this problem and ensure that their app is energy efficient.

GameBench is one of the easiest ways to gather power metrics that are both reliable and immediately useful for optimisation. In this article we’ll go through the basic steps of how to get these data , using YouTube and Netflix as examples.

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• GameBench Staff
• 28. June 2016
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News reading apps are the quiet ninjas of the mobile world. On the face of it, they perform a simple, repetitive task: displaying the daily news. Whether it's the Huffington Post, the BBC, The Guardian or the Mail Online, they all go about this task in very similar ways.

Behind the scenes, however, the popularity of the leading news outlets is so great, and there’s so much pressure to engage and retain habitual readers (who are fussy and spoilt for choice), that news reading apps have become the focus of huge amounts of technical skill and resources, both in terms of software development and QA. The apps may be simple, but perfecting them isn’t.

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• GameBench Staff
• 06. May 2016

• ios, UX, testing, Mail Online, BBC News, Huffington Post, android, frame rate, fps, responsiveness, gamebench, Guardian

• 0 Comments