If you'll be at GDC this year, please feel free to come and meet us. We can help you to use our latest free tools to test any game or device that you're interested in, so you can discover how its frame rate, resource usage and other performance metrics compare to rival products on the market.
We're excited to announce that GameBench has just entered into a key partnership with TestPlant, a leader in the automated app testing space.
We're working to allow our respective products, GameBench-A and eggPlant, to work seamlessly with each other, so that TestPlant customers -- including brands like HP, Nike, MTV many others -- can gain extra performance insights from their automated app testing.
These customers will be able to script a set of user actions and deploy that script hundreds or thousands of times across different software builds or different hardware models in order to rapidly identify UX slow-downs, graphics bottlenecks and other optimisation issues. All the performance data from these automated tests will be fed back to their GameBench dashboard for visualisation, comparison and sharing with other team members.
We've just completed a thorough round of game testing on the iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, and a number of other iPhones and Android phones. For the first time, we've even tested some Chinese Android phones (i.e., phones intended primarily for the Chinese market), to see how they compare.
Some of our key findings are presented below, including charts comparing average frame rates for each device as measured across a sample of popular games based on the Unity engine. Frame rate metrics are widely considered to be the best objective proxy for smooth gameplay and hence a good user experience, and our charts compare three such metrics: the median average, the stability around this average, and minimum (i.e. worst) frame rate observed during gameplay. For more information, you can register to receive our full, free-of-charge report in PDF format:
When: 11am to 6pm, October 15th
Where: Dolby Theatre, Soho Square, London
What: open(London) is a unique gathering of developers, publishers, chip designers and device makers who share a common goal of improving mobile gaming. Confirmed speakers include people from ARM, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Thumbstar, Unity and more.
Check out our event page to learn more and book your tickets, which you can get free if you're an indie dev or TIGA member. Also, we still have two slots free for game showcases, which will give indies a chance to show off their latest game on the big Dolby screen, talk about the performance challenges they've faced and meet potential supporters on the hardware side of the industry. Get in touch with sharif@gamebench.net if you're interested.
Event page: GameBench presents open(London) 2015
When it was first unveiled, the LG G4 made a great first impression as an all-round smartphone. It came with a nice leather option, a rich and extremely high-resolution “Quantum Display,” plus a sophisticated rear camera that has been much raved about by mobile photography gurus.
But gamers and hardware enthusiasts probably found that their eyes settled on a different characteristic of the G4: its relatively uncommon Snapdragon 808 processor. There were fears that this chip was somehow a last-minute compromise, perhaps made in response to rumours of overheating issues with the higher-end Snapdragon 810. Whatever the reason behind LG's choice, many prospective buyers have asked whether this supposed downgrade of the chipset might hurt gaming performance, and that's precisely the question we're going to try to answer using the real-world tests below.