Samsung Galaxy S3 gaming review: Part 13

Gaming

The Samsung Galaxy SIII - a phone worthy of the hype

The gaming experience on the Samsung Galaxy S3 is meant to be one of the best thanks to that Mali-400MP GPU running at the heart - Samsung is promising big things from the gaming side of things as a result.

It's still something of a tradeoff though - in our opinion, the ability of the Nvidia Tegra 3 chip at harnessing all those polygons at pixels is still the most impressive on a smartphone or tablet.

You can also compare the respective gaming hubs on offer - admittedly, Nvidia has created a dedicated TegraZone portal to get your hands on as many high-power games as possible, but the option from Samsung is currently almost useless.

You get two zones: one for premium games, and one for the more casual player (noted as 'Social Games). However, the premium offerings are far away from a) taxing the phone in any way and b) worth paying for in reality.

Sure, there are some half decent ones in there, but nothing that compares to the likes of Riptide GP on the HTC One X.

However, a note on that title - while you don't get all the whizzbang effects, like water splashing up at the screen and the turbo mode causing the graphics to speed up (both of which Nvidia has stolen for its Tegra 3 devices... and are really only window dressing) the experience is still awesome.

We're also finally starting to see evidence of proper gaming to tax the Samsung Galaxy S3 - for instance, we're able to play N.O.V.A. 3 on the phone too, and it's quite the match of the iPhone variant, proving that all that power isn't going to waste.

Any criticism of the gaming capabilities of the Samsung Galaxy S3 is hard, as it's clearly a handset that's able to handle most things you can throw at it.

However, Google's Play Store needs to up its game (so to speak) as there's really very little to help out the more interested gamer. You can find casual gaming as its own section, but the more resource intensive titles are hidden among the cutesie tower defence and stick man games.

But try the likes of Grand Theft Auto 3 or Dead Space and you CERTAINLY won't be unimpressed by the polygon management or general responsiveness of this, Samsung's greatest gaming device yet.