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Published on September 13th, 2012 00:28
Digital Foundry's assessment of the new Amazon slates' gaming prowess
Last year, while researching an iPad feature, an insider in the mobile industry told me that when the dust settles, the only major hardware manufacturers in the mobile market will be those with access to significant content libraries - Apple, Google and Amazon. Almost one year on, the source's prediction is beginning to look eerily accurate - in the tablet arena at least. iPad continues to rule the market, but Google - and now Amazon - have finally stepped up their efforts in challenging Apple's all-conquering slate. Suddenly, everything else is beginning to look rather over-priced and increasingly irrelevant in comparison.
Last week's announcement of the new Kindle Fire tablets shows a renewed focus from Amazon on their tablet range with products aimed squarely at competing with both the Nexus 7 and the iPad. The 7-inch Kindle Fire HD is an intriguing release similar to the Google slate in many ways, with just a small reshuffling in terms of spec: the high-power quad-core Tegra 3 is replaced by a dual-core TI OMAP processor, but the Kindle Fire HD offers twice the storage for the same price.
There are other goodies too: specifically the inclusion of a Micro HDMI port that allows downloaded and streaming movies to run directly on an HDTV. Amazon also takes aim at the iPad by including proper stereo speakers in the unit, based on a collaboration with Dolby, no less - an interesting contrast to the mono-speaker technology found in Apple's tablet.
While display resolution is identical to the Nexus 7 at 1280x800 and using the same IPS technology for improved viewing angles, commentators have noted improved colour reproduction on the Amazon device, along with an improved anti-glare feature which goes some way in addressing the reflective issues on the Google tablet. Amazon is clearly taking media consumption seriously - this is a Kindle after all - and the firm clearly wants to give its hardware the best shot at working in as many different environments as possible.
However, the big concern with the tablet concerns the choice of its main processor: TI's OMAP 4460 SoC (system on chip) graces the 7-inch offering - the same chip found in the Galaxy Nexus Smartphone and in no way competitive with the likes of Tegra 3 or the A5 chip found in the iPhone 4S and iPad 2, let alone this year's A5X revision. The Nexus 7 tablet acquits itself as a decent games machine, but it's hard to imagine that the Fire HD can offer anything like the same experience: it'll almost certainly be fine for 2D titles, but based on our experience with equivalent hardware, it will definitely struggle with more advanced 3D games. The PowerVR SGX540 integrated into the Kindle Fire HD is very long in the tooth now - roughly equivalent to the now-outmoded Tegra 2 from NVIDIA.
The new 7-inch Kindle Fire HD offers up an overall external package similar to Google's Nexus 7 with a number of useful enhancements, such as HDMI output and Dolby-approved stereo sound. However, it uses a core chipset that's significantly less powerful than the NVIDIA Tegra 3 inside the Google slate.
The situation is improved significantly with the new 8.9-inch Fire HD, which sees Amazon upgrade the spec to a more capable OMAP 4470. It's still a dual-core part in terms of CPU power, but the GPU gets a decent upgrade - enough for firm boss Jeff Bezos to make the bold claim that the integrated PowerVR SGX544 actually has the better of Tegra 3. Certainly in terms of memory bandwidth and floating point operations, it's a white-wash, with the IMG chipset comprehensively out-performing the NVIDIA part. But the SGX544 is an older part, and TI is using a single graphics core rather than the multi-core arrangements found in the iPad.
Once again it's unlikely that high-end 3D apps will match the Tegra 3 tablets in terms of performance, especially bearing in mind the additional resolution the chipset services: NVIDIA's tech has typically been paired with 1280x800 screens, but with the Kindle Fire HD 8.9-inch, Amazon has gone for a full-on 1920x1200 resolution.
Bearing in mind that this is mostly the preserve of 24-inch desktop displays, that's a hell of a lot of pixels crammed into a very small space - not quite of the "Retina"-level, but impressive nonetheless. Unfortunately, when it comes to gaming, more pixels requires more GPU power to maintain performance and it's difficult to imagine that the new Kindle holds a candle to the iPad 2 and "new iPad", where Apple has invested hugely in graphics power, and reaped the benefits.
Yet despite the substantial power differential, the 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD (curiously, not coming to the UK yet, according to the Amazon UK website) looks like being the most credible challenger to the iPad - in terms of the larger form-factor at least - that we've seen. It retains all of the advantages of the 7-inch model - Dolby audio, HDMI output - and boasts a $299 pricepoint up against the $399 of the iPad 2 and the $499 of the new iPad. The 4G LTE version of Amazon's effort actually
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