Want to know how fast your Android device is performing? There are several apps available that provide extensive benchmarking like GLBenchmark, AnTuTu and Geekbench 2. But if you're looking for something simple and somewhat interactive, Epic Games has the perfect app for you: Epic Citadel for Android.
Epic Games' flagship Unreal Engine 3 tech demo made its debut on Apple's iOS platform back on September 1, 2010, as an introduction to Epic's entry into the mobile market. As with the new Android version, the demo allows users to wander through a fictional, dynamic medieval realm focused on a castle and surrounding attractions like a circus bazaar, a cathedral, a river and more.
But for the Android version, Epic has thrown in a benchmarking feature that pulls the device through various locations through out the castle's realm. The resulting data only shows an average framerate, quality settings and resolution details.
For kicks, Epic Citadel ran at a modest 48 fps on the Nexus 10 using high quality settings and a 2560 x 1504 resolution. The smaller Tegra 3-powered Nexus 7 had a framerate of 56 fps using high quality settings and a 1280 x 736 resolution. Epic said that it worked closely with Nvidia throughout the tech demo's development to ensure that the visuals can be experienced on Nvidia Tegra-based devices "in all of their glory."
"While we’ve licensed our engine to help developers build and ship many fantastic games for Android, Epic Citadel is our first internally developed product to be released to Android users," said Jay Wilbur, vice president of Epic Games. "It’s a free, easy way to check out the high-quality experience Unreal Engine technology delivers on mobile devices."
To download and test your Android device using Epic Citadel (or if you feel like wandering around a medieval realm), head to Google Play or Amazon's Appstore for Android. An updated version for iOS has also been released with support for 5th-gen iPhone / iPod Touch models and the 4th-gen iPad, but it does not contain the benchmarking feature.
