I downloaded Bounce yesterday and have played it twice. Once alone and once with buddies watching. When I showed it to my buddies, their first comments were "Oh... it stutters a bit".

The game does stutter, especially in the beginning. It sort of freezes alltogether for a second and then continues. Frame rate seems very good though when it's not stuttering.

Controls are very responsive and it's an awesome demo to show off the device with. It's not really a game, since you can complete the first level in less than a minute and there are only two levels.

But to answer your question: Yes it stutters. It doesn't lag, because to me that means it's falling behind all the time and 95% of the game runs perfectly smooth.

Pay attention to what you're running in the background. If you want to assess Bounce itself, run it after a reboot (after the device has settled down) and in offline mode. Noticeable stuttering is perfectly normal when you have half a dozen tasks doing their things in the background (or plainly taking up memory).

Also keep in mind the N900 is pushing around 2.5x more pixels than, say, the iPhone. It would probably help quite a bit if there was an option to halve resolution.

No stuttering on my device (except perhaps the occasional tiny hickup), but I do remember that it ran pretty badly for a while. Perhaps it was fixed, or something else on the system.

Of course background tasks and/or low memory situations will cause the game to stutter, it's still essentially a _phone_ after all, running high quality 3D graphics. That you can even do multi-tasking while running the game is quite a feat.

Framerates for the most part match the video (although there are places where they drop to what I would perceive as around 15-20 FPS), and there is no noticeable lag from the accelerometer. You are probably confusing this with the inertia, which is a bit on the heavy side.

A little game called Enigma should give a better idea of accelerometer sensitivity, and it's hard to control because the ball reacts to the smallest tilt.

I think the forest level may not be 100% smooth all the time, although the space level pretty much is. But both run very well and are really playable.

Running something on the background will affect this of course, but without reboot or without turning off phone but just not running anything else seems very playable to me. It is perfectly OK while playing music on the background too.

For those still looking for those hidden apples... read this in reverse:

seert eht kcik

The video posted by the developers is pretty deceptive in regards to actual performance. The video posted on youtube (Ilinked n the OP's post) seems to have been captured directly from the frame buffer. It's very likely that the video was not being rendered on an N900 when captured and probably on desktop hardware in order to achieve that smooth 30fps. I've seen videos of people playing bounce and I've been able to see the constant lagging. I'll tell you this, it's not a constant 30fps, more like 5-15fps but it's pretty impressive for a handheld to pull off graphics like those.

Just try rebooting your phone

Thanks for all the replys! Its a very interesting device indeed. I love that it is resistive because that means we could end up with some really good RPGs in the future that demand accuracy!

Mmm... picking up loot with the stylus...

Those of you who have observed Bounce lagging badly, what firmware version do you have on your phone? Some pre-production version or the sales release 42-11? An important graphics fix made in the software just before the sales release which almost doubled up the performance of Bounce so some lagging is expected if the game is run with an older software.

Also, the device has computation priority groups (cgroups) and Bounce is currently classified incorrectly to have only background priority. Fortunately this doesn't normally affect the performance too much when running only Bounce. But in multitasking situation it can potentially make it perform badly if other applications are open because all applications withing the same group have a shared resource usage limit.

About the official YouTube video, yes it is captured on desktop computer but just because it is much more convenient to do so, not to cheat. On the contrary, it actually has lower frame rate on many occasions compared to the device. The video was captured with a constant frame rate of 30 but for example the race level on the device has frame rate between 40 and 60.

The forest level is indeed bit heavier than the race but it shouldn't be noticeably laggy either. The fps drops to 18 in two places for a second but on the average it is running between 25 and 40.

- Miika (from Rovio)