We asked, you told us: High performance gaming is for half of you

This week's poll asked how important is high-performance 3D gaming to you, and the

The state of gaming has often been demanding on hardware, with the latest shooters, motorsports, or RPGs throwing every kind of wonderful graphics demands on the internals like your GPU, CPU, and RAM. And it's all worth it, it's quite remarkable how good smartphone games like PUBG Mobile, Riptide, and Asphalt look and play, and how much they ask of your tiny hand-held device. Especially compared to the old PC towers we used to own in the 90s and 00s!

Now, not all phones are super capable and not everyone has a spare console or PC at time. So for some people, having a phone that's able to run these types of games is everything. For others, they're much more dedicated to their gaming setup and while mobile games are fun, they're not quite the same experience as playing on your TV setup or PC monitors.

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But it's still remarkable that most mid- to high-end phones are running these demanding titles without a hitch, thanks to the weaponised triangle-producing-processing available from GPUs. It's one of the hottest areas of development, and Arm's new Mali-G76 GPU, which was announced alongside the Cortex-A76 CPU, shows us the next generation of graphics processors.

Arm reckons that the new Mali-G76 GPU is roughly twice as powerful as the Mali-G72, as well as 30 percent more energy efficient. That means phones will be able to run even more graphic-intensive games and last even longer. It's quite remarkable that our thumbs will be driving such powerful devices, and that's why we're seeing special smartphones dedicated to gaming – bigger screens, more ports for charging, and so on.

But just how many of you are into high-performance mobile gaming? Well, we asked, and you told us, and the results across everywhere we ran the poll showed a lot of sameness:

Here's what's interesting: where we were able to run more than two poll options, we saw one in four of you say it's very important to you. Then just a little percentage uptick more said it's somewhat important, which in total, means more than half of you are playing 3D and high-performance games either a lot, or a little.

Then there's the other group, just under half at around 45 percent, more or less, who just don't think it's important. And that's fair enough – some of the most popular games are either very simple challenges, 2D games, or like Pokémon Go which is a mix of 3D elements and simple play, but not exactly graphically intensive.

Niantic

But, when we gave you just two options, such as on Facebook and Instagram, that's when things got a little weird. The IG numbers matched the overall options, while the Facebook results were skewed much further towards non-gaming. Feel free to put out theories on why that might be.

The comments we received were a nice mix of insights into why you might game, why you might not, and some comments on the state of mobile gaming as well. Oh, and lots of PUBG Mobile and emulator comments too. Here's a selection:

• I don't own a performant computer so I need a good smartphone to be able to enjoy some gaming.
• There are very few Android games which are addictive [and demanding] but since PUBG came out, everything changed. Now I want high 3d gaming performance, just for PUBG Mobile.
• Most of my gaming is done on my PS4. I only play time wasters on my phone…
• It's something I care about, but it's become a small consideration in selecting a phone because processors have matured much faster than the software pushing them.

Now for the mobile-gaming-market-is-broken comments (and also read: Harry Potter and the prisoner of microtransactions)

• I don't care about mobile gaming as much as I'd like because of how ruined it is at the moment. The vast majority of games out there are of the "freemium" model. Mobile gaming can be much more than it is but it feels like the EA greed has infected everyone.
  • Plus a response: This isn't greed, it's the result of an audience that absolutely refuses to pay for games up front … Mobile game publishers poisoned the well before the market ever really took off.

Thanks everyone for voting and for offering insight into high-powered gaming on your mobile – see you next week!

 

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