Ouya 2 + Nvidia relationship (pro/con)

[Victor Coleiro]

I was thinking about the Soc the Ouya 2 might use next year and was wondering what would happen if the best Soc on the market was a Baytrail or an Atom Soc using Airmont cores. This is a very distinct possibility IMO.

As Nvidia are invested in the Ouya (financially) and have worked closely with the Ouya team in helping bring the Ouya to market. The question is, will Ouya be able to use a Soc like a Baytrail or one based on Airmont, or will they be obliged to use the Tegra 4?

I wonder whether the relationship with Nvidia will end up being restrictive , and potentially destructive.

[DrunkPunk]

Interesting thought.
Nvidia hasn't risen to the top of the mobile gaming processors by putting out inferior product though, so I would think that if Ouya sticks with them for the next Ouya(s), they will still be able to handle the "next gen" of Android gaming. One thing that could come out of it though is more competition, but I think that would be a good thing.

[airman]

Interesting thought indeed, but I don't see this happening. OUYA is gonna stay on nVidia judging by the way the market is and nVidia's position inside of it.

[markimus]

I think it'd be a bit daft on OUYA's part to change to a different chip maker (SOC whatever) as I'm pretty sure that would mean some backwards compatibility problems with previous games that get released for the current OUYA. Now they've gone with the tegra they should stick with it, unless something major happens.

[James Andrew Coote]

If OUYA don't stick to NVidia / Tegra chips, it will put off some developers. They won't want to optimise games for Tegra or whatever else, only to find that when next year's OUYA comes out, their games suddenly aren't compatible.

The other thing is that the more powerful chipsets probably won't be available to OUYA cheap enough to get them under that $99 price. OUYA will always be using last year's tech because it is a budget device. Having NVidia onboard almost guarantees that OUYA will be able to get last year's Tegra for cheap, while going elsewhere, the makers of the chips might not have so much invested, and so not cut OUYA as good a deal

[Victor Coleiro]

I always thought "optimized for Tegra" was um, we'll, a complete wank.
It is my understanding that those games ran just as we'll on equiv SOCs from other competitors like Qualcomm.

[Magnesus]

I think Tegra will always be on top or close to the top with the GPU. And GPU is most important in a gaming console. Their CPU might not be as good as the best out there (Snapdragon 800 is insane) but that doesn't matter that much here. As for the "optimized for Tegra" - all those games work on other SoCs AFAIK with a simple texture fix (Tegra allows use of different texture format - probably just so it can be incompatible).

[Alketi]

Well, first, Ouya is under no obligation to work with nVidia on the Ouya 2.

Second, the Snapdragon 800 has INSANE performance today -- almost 2x the nearest ARM chip including the dual-core Samsung A15 on some benchmarks. (The Tegra3 would be dead last on every chart here) http://www.anandtech.com/show/7082/s...lopment-tablet

Third, don't count out an Intel solution, as their 22nm Atom is releasing the end of this year.

Lastly, the Ouya 2 is likely to have SO much more performance that today's Ouya will look like a toy by comparison. For a device shipping mid to late next year, I would expect somewhere between 2-4x the performance, which is amazing when you think about it. For that, you can take all the "Tegra 3 optimizations" and throw them out the window. They won't matter.

[CaptainCapslock]

I'm nearly 100% sure that Ouya will stay with Nvidia and the Tegra processors.
The brand-recognition in itself is worth choosing the Tegra series for. I know that is a silly argument, but everything that the end-consumer can relate to makes a great argument for a sale.

[Diablohead]

Since nvidia are bringing out their own tegra 4 portable console it makes me think that the ouya 2 would be a rival to their own hardware on the shelves, and either the ouya 2 would have an underclocked tegra 4 or something in between, no idea what.