Beach Buggy Blitz And Dead Trigger
Beach Buggy Blitz
First up is Beach Buggy Blitz, a fairly standard Mario Kart-style racing game. Beach Buggy Blitz offers a single Android version with Tegra 3 optimizations for Nvidia-powered devices. The game ran on all four of our test devices without issue.
We noticed several graphical embellishments on the Tegra 3-packing HTC One X+. One example is the more realistic headlight effects in darker areas of certain tracks, such as caves. Another example is the droplets that appear on the screen when driving through water. The screen shots don’t do these effects any justice, but the features did improve our overall sense of immersion in the game. Beach Buggy Blitz is visually identical on the iPhone 5, Nexus 4, and Samsung Galaxy S III.
Dead Trigger
Dead Trigger may very well be the best example of a Tegra 3-optimized game. This zombie-infested first-person shooter‘s lone Android package adapts to the GPU. We had no problems running Dead Trigger on any of our four test devices.
From the second Dead Trigger starts, the visual differences are glaring. Particle effects, water effects, lighting, smoke, and additional details are all visible on the HTC One X+. But while Nvidia has the exclusive on those effects under Android, Apple's hardware is also fast enough to display them all too. So, we end up with the most graphically-detailed version on the HTC One X+ and the iPhone 5. This game on the Galaxy S III and Nexus 4 is empty in comparison.
For those inclined, the additional effects can be enabled on a rooted Android smartphone, though we cannot attest to the stability or performance of the game should you do so.