Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Over the years, hardware has become more and more powerful, and now there are phones,
tablets, and set-top boxes ranging from devices with 2.5" QVGA screens, running only a
software renderer on a 500 MHz ARM CPU, all the way up to machines with dual 1 GHz CPUs,
with very powerful GPUs that can support HDTV.
We've already discussed fragmentation issues, but developers will also need to cope with
this vast range of screen sizes, capabilities, and performance. The best way to do that is to
understand the minimum hardware and make it the lowest common denominator for game
design and performance testing.
The Minimum Practical Target
As of mid 2012, less than 3% of all Android devices are running a version of Android older
than 2.1. This is important because it means that the game you start now will only have to
support a minimum API level of 7 (2.1), and it will still reach 97% of all Android devices (by
version) by the time it's completed. This isn't to say that you can't use the latest new features!
You certainly can, and we'll show you how. You'll simply need to design your game with some
fallback mechanisms to bring compatibility down to version 2.1. Current data is available via
Google at http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-versions.html , and a
chart collected in August 2012 is shown in Figure 1-3 .
Figure 1-3. Android version distributions on August 1, 2012
So, what's a good baseline device to use as a minimum target? Go back to the first
Android 2.1 device released: the original Motorola Droid , shown in Figure 1-4 . While it has
since been updated to Android 2.2, the Droid is still a widely used device that is reasonably
capable in terms of both CPU and GPU performance.
 
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