Forums » General
Exynos Galaxy S8 problems.
We've had a lot of stuff blowing up in the last couple of weeks, which has really been a drag on development, and us.. psychologically. Anyway:
We recently were part of the big Oculus / Samsung announcement for the Galaxy S8 / S8+ launch, with the new Gear VR headset, and controller. One of 20 titles selected as Marquee launch content. Yay.
However, apparently no one at Oculus or Samsung actually tested the game on their shiny new devices. And there's a catastrophic driver bug on the international Exynos version of the S8 / S8+ (this is not the one sold in the US, that uses a Qualcomm chipset).
It's not our bug, it's a Mali GPU driver bug trying to read random data from the wrong location in memory. But, for Gear VR users the "game is crashing", so we're getting slammed with one-star reviews on that platform.
We've asked Oculus to remove the game for Exynos (or all S8) users, but we're not sure if they.. want to do that, or when they might get around to it. I've also excluded all S8 devices from the Play Store for the moment (there's like 16 variants, and I can't tell which code-names are Qualcomm and which are Exynos, and Google searching turned up nothing at all).
We're trying to ship a new updater tonight on GearVR with a warning to Exynos device owners. The problem is, GearVR is a paid install ($3), and we have no way to refund anyone (Oculus does not give us the option of refunds), so people are extra unhappy when they find the thing they paid for does not work.
So, anyway, if you ran out and bought an S8 to play the game.. sorry? We're working on it.
Similarly, if you're waiting for all the other new content we're working on, sorry, stuff like this has been happening a lot lately. And if we don't react to this quickly, the reputation damage in terms of "star ratings" and reviews becomes practically un-recoverable, and may have a very big impact on our revenue and ability to make future deals.
We recently were part of the big Oculus / Samsung announcement for the Galaxy S8 / S8+ launch, with the new Gear VR headset, and controller. One of 20 titles selected as Marquee launch content. Yay.
However, apparently no one at Oculus or Samsung actually tested the game on their shiny new devices. And there's a catastrophic driver bug on the international Exynos version of the S8 / S8+ (this is not the one sold in the US, that uses a Qualcomm chipset).
It's not our bug, it's a Mali GPU driver bug trying to read random data from the wrong location in memory. But, for Gear VR users the "game is crashing", so we're getting slammed with one-star reviews on that platform.
We've asked Oculus to remove the game for Exynos (or all S8) users, but we're not sure if they.. want to do that, or when they might get around to it. I've also excluded all S8 devices from the Play Store for the moment (there's like 16 variants, and I can't tell which code-names are Qualcomm and which are Exynos, and Google searching turned up nothing at all).
We're trying to ship a new updater tonight on GearVR with a warning to Exynos device owners. The problem is, GearVR is a paid install ($3), and we have no way to refund anyone (Oculus does not give us the option of refunds), so people are extra unhappy when they find the thing they paid for does not work.
So, anyway, if you ran out and bought an S8 to play the game.. sorry? We're working on it.
Similarly, if you're waiting for all the other new content we're working on, sorry, stuff like this has been happening a lot lately. And if we don't react to this quickly, the reputation damage in terms of "star ratings" and reviews becomes practically un-recoverable, and may have a very big impact on our revenue and ability to make future deals.
Samsung needs to stick to TVs they are horrible with phones
That's some inane quality control on Samsung/Oculus, hopefully they or somebody from ARM can be reached before to much time elapses.
ARM is working on it, they reproduced it, but they don't really have an answer for us yet.
This experience is also pretty par for the course in mobile. In general, mobile graphics drivers are pretty fragile, and "newer" stuff is usually more-broken. NVIDIA probably had the most robust drivers, and they've practically been driven out of the mobile market.
But, the thing is, everyone knows the drivers are fragile, which makes the lack of QA in this case all the more surprising. Anyway, whatever, life goes on..
This experience is also pretty par for the course in mobile. In general, mobile graphics drivers are pretty fragile, and "newer" stuff is usually more-broken. NVIDIA probably had the most robust drivers, and they've practically been driven out of the mobile market.
But, the thing is, everyone knows the drivers are fragile, which makes the lack of QA in this case all the more surprising. Anyway, whatever, life goes on..
Inc,
You weren't kidding, they really hide that model information!
Some poking around found this Web site claims to have the model info:
http://www.phonemore.com/samsung-galaxy-s8-plus/models/765
and
http://www.phonemore.com/samsung-galaxy-s8/models/764
Hope this helps.
You weren't kidding, they really hide that model information!
Some poking around found this Web site claims to have the model info:
http://www.phonemore.com/samsung-galaxy-s8-plus/models/765
and
http://www.phonemore.com/samsung-galaxy-s8/models/764
Hope this helps.
Unfortunately, Google uses the codenames, not the model numbers. So like "dreamlteskt" versus "dreamqlteue" versus "dreamqltesq". And then god knows what carriers buy which models, and so on..
Anyway, for the moment we're just focused on trying to resolve ARM's driver bug, so we can re-enable access for all the S8s without concern.
Anyway, for the moment we're just focused on trying to resolve ARM's driver bug, so we can re-enable access for all the S8s without concern.