[At Your Own Risk] How to play Dead Trigger with ALL Tegra 3 graphics on your Galaxy SII, Note, Nexus, or SIII (Bonus Dead Trigger Sixaxis profile!)

Screenshot from Dead Trigger taken from my SIII, but where did those 'Tegra 3 exclusive'
water effects come from? Read on, you know you want to know how...

We're always up for providing a quick how-to here at AndroidNZ, particularly when it lets us work around artificial restrictions placed on our devices. Naturally in this instance I'm talking about those Tegra-3 'exclusive' graphical extras that we're meant to miss out on in Madfingergames latest zombie frag-fest Dead Trigger, despite having perfectly capable hardware.

If you read part two of our Galaxy SIII review you'll know exactly how I feel about Tegra-exclusivity, and you'll also be aware that even with Root and Chainfire 3D, Tegra-3 versions of titles aren't working with our Galaxy SIIIs (and if you haven't read the review piece you'd better make a start, part two is nearly 9,000 words long and you want to finish it before the next part goes live, right?!).

Or at least, that's how things were when I wrote that part of the review.

You see, as of now we can avail ourselves of those lovely Tegra-3 graphics in Dead Trigger. I wish I could report that this was via an update to Chainfire 3D, as that might give hope of unlocking those other Tegra-3 exclusives for us, but sadly the news isn't quite that good. Nevertheless, it is still quite good news, since apart from actually working, the method for enabling the extra graphical touches in Dead Trigger is, well, dead-simple (many thanks to SnakeHaveYou at XDA for bringing this to light for us).

In fact, it's so simple that there isn't really much to the guide that follows at all. That being the case I thought I had better add a sweetener, and this time it's a Sixaxis Controller Touch Emulation profile for you to download...

Oh, and if you saw the [At Your Risk] moniker and wondered what risks might be involved here, you can exhale now - the worst you can do is wipe your present game progress (and even then only if you're a muppet).

Read on!

ASUS Transformer Prime: Video playback shootout (and bonus update on the evolving Inisoft saga!)

So does the Tegra 3 have your back for video playback,
or do we have another failed generation of Android
tablet video playback to look forward to?

...a new day, a new Transformer Prime video. Sounds fair right?

This time we're bringing you our standard video playback test, running our wide gamut of test files at the Transformer Prime. While you'll see many other reviews saying "yeah this played everything we threw at it", the truth is many of them have a pretty narrow spectrum of test files to try out. We've tried to gather a range that encompasses a wide variety of resolutions, bitrates, subtitle types, and video and audio encoding formats - our hope is that if there is an archilles heel in the video playback capability of a device we'll be able to uncover it.

This shapes up to be a pretty big test for the Transformer Prime, since the video playback deficiencies of the Tegra 2 based Android tablets (AKA virtually all of them) are quite well known. If that sentence has you scratching your head, here's a precis: Tegra 2 devices can't play high profile video files, support a small range of codecs natively, and can't play 1080p files smoothly. The result? Video transcoding hell, where you have to convert all your space-preserving MKVs into something the Tegra 2 can get on with.

So the big question on my mind is can the Tegra chipset handle video properly this time around? The spec sheet suggests yes, since high profile video is clearly mentioned...             ...but then up until today the spec sheet also said the Prime has GPS, so I guess we'll just have to see now won't we?

Asus officially announces the Transformer Prime

Image courtesy of Engadget.com

While previously seen at AsiaD the Transformer Prime had yet to have an official announcement. Well suffice to say now there has been one. The Transformer Prime is officially being released Worldwide in December 2011.

As a sequel to the popular Asus Eee Pad Transformer, the Prime has some rather large shoes to fill as a hybrid tablet computing device. Thankfully it appears to have some pretty amazing specs that include a Tegra 3 processor and a slim Zenbook-esque design to boot. 

You can check out the specs and what we think after the jump