Samsung Galaxy S — Some ICS gaming experience

For everybody, I'd like to tell my gaming experience on my SGS with some Ice Cream Sandwich Android 4.0.3 software. As the most part of big games are made for gingerbread it is a bit of early upgrade. Some games FC and they were my favorite til I upgraded. Let's see what games are those: Gang star Miami Vindication, Modern Combat 3, Asphalt 6 and some others that use chached files to run. As now Android has better hardware acceleration, gaming experience is great on the available ones. While ICS is still buggy it gives out about 1350 in Quadrant Benchmark test. This proofs that AOSP has got better but let's return to gaming. Sometimes games run with success but sometimes they just crash, system is made otherwise than Gingerbread and games can't work as they must. For example MC3 crashes while checking the chache cause of disconnection from internet due to my poor connection. And GMV FCs on launch, but if you like some driving games Asphalt 5 that was found in SamsungApps is still a led to run with success and RoC (Race of Champions, free in market) does run quite well. Fruit Ninja is good on ICS but sometimes looses touch so fruits fall down and the same issue is found in Cut the Rope. Doodle jump is on the highest clouds of performance and Angry birds give it a fly being a little buggy but enjoyable. Other simple games work well and SGS is able to run other processes while gaming, the best option is still Gingerbread for Android gaming fans and developers to go. But for instance ICS market will grow and better performance will be unveiled for both single and dual-core devices.

I'd like to know how you think about android gaming down below in this thread.

I wonder what the main problem could be? Those sound like popular titles, I would have thought the developers would have them working perfectly.

Would you mind giving my games a try and let me know how they run? I've tested them in the 4.0 emulator, but don't have an actual device.

https://market.android.com/details?id=xdebugx.dagazEhwas
https://market.android.com/details?id=xdebugx.OTCL
https://market.android.com/details?id=xdebugx.tetraGomyA
https://market.android.com/details?id=xdebugx.partyLightA

Thanks!

They run nicely, all of them. Many games run on ICS as long as they are one file games that don't use chache and so on. For some kind of reason games that use extra files fail to validate though in your case they are ready to go.

Thanks Alex, much appreciated!

Testing is my second name and most things I use are in "beta" or "alpha" state, those games ran fluidly. Anyway, Samsung won't release official ICS update for us due to so called "lack of hardware memory for ROM and RAM". All this was said in last week. While the ROM space is tight and limited by /datadata partillion the RAM space holds in 120-90mb free for average. Those numbers give plenty of space to work on while average Gingerbread ROMs and kernels with no tweaks give maximum 60-40mb free, even when no Touchwiz UI used. All that free space can be used for everything, high end games can use up to 30mb of RAM and give you a hardly running device that lags even on ext4 base (but if rfs base (stock) is used you must hope that device won't blow up or burn down). Still more improvements can be done to system like more fluid UI by implementing Sony Bravia engine and more performance as my maximum my device reached was 1870 in Quadrant test (which is incredible for single- core device running GB 2.3.4 custom kernel on stock ROM).

Continuing with my gaming theme.

For being a user for a year, I have played and tested many games on my device. Many of them were for high end devices (specially last months) but I could handle them. Biggest game was Modern Combat black Pegasus and to recent MinecraftPE. Many of the games fail at start on ICS but there aren't huge amount of them (sry for any grammar mistakes here), many games simply launch and others FC on every 10sec. To be honest the only game has made through all the time of usage is Angry Birds, and now while original game UI made to AB Rio it is even better to play. Otherwise I love racing games but there aren't many of them that manage to run on ICS, Asphalt 5, NFS Shift, and Race of Champions by In ictus (free in market) are the few ones I managed to run on my device running ICS.

Being a huge fan of Samsung and Android I love my SGS and through last days the ICS update was mentioned on many forums and websites. By this I mean that would official Android 4.0 come to GS or not, with latest sources in mind it will, and it will be stripped off tweaked AOSP. What does it mean to gaming? Stability of gaming, more support of hardware and absolute composition of it. It also means that it will be easier to tweak ROMs for better performance and speed.
Returning to gaming, while gaming giants of android market (like Gameloft or EA) still have their view to Gingerbread performance, small developing groups give new games out, for us and for our free time.

Happy new year everyone! Thank you for reading all stuff I've written in this forum thread and have a nice year.