I was talking hardware with someone on the internet and they said that indie games don't need more power than the PS2. I could have misunderstood them, but let's say for a second that this is exactly what they meant...

The PS2 is weaker than most mobile hardware. Its performance is probably similar to a Tegra 2, a somewhat dated tablet CPU/GPU.

On the one hand, "most" indies don't have the ability or time to produce tons of content, making the guy somewhat correct. On the other hand, it's hard to optimize for Tegra 2 hardware. My target platform is a Snapdragon 600, which is probably 3-4 times as powerful as a Tegra 2 or PS2, and I still might run into the occasional problem. Mobile CPUs just aren't very powerful it seems, without the right performance "tricks".

What do you think?

(Also, some side information. When not writing a mobile game from scratch and not using every performance trick, you can create maybe 100 moving instances of an object on a Tegra 3 (which is about half as powerful as your most powerful tablet chip available right now. http://www.yoyogames.com/tech_blog/61

That's if I'm understanding everything about the article correctly, when telling the number of instances isn't its only purpose.)

There's another point I want to bring up though, that is just my opinion. Indies actually need more power for the same game as a big studio, because they may very well have less time for testing/optimization than a big studio "should" have.

I read somewhere last year that Jonathan Blow's "The Witness" was supposed to eat up a significant portion of PS4's memory when running, presumably due to lack of optimization. Now, I'm not saying that it can't be or shouldn't be optimized, but indie developers have limited resources, especially manpower (like you noted). If it's graphic artists they lack, yes, they probably could fit in a mobile hardware. But what if it's programmers they lack? Imagine an indie team with 9 artists and a single programmer, working on a 3D title. While Jon Blow isn't the only coder in his team, I can understand the decision to not optimize as much.

I could be wrong, but I don't think those people you talked to really understand what "indie game" means.

I was talking hardware with someone on the internet and they said that indie games don't need more power than the PS2.

They're assuming that indie games == simple 2D games??
I know a guy who's successfully making an indie MMO using CryEngine, for PC, PS4 and Xbone. This game obviously won't run on PS2...
My own indie game is also aimed at those same hardware platforms...

There's another point I want to bring up though, that is just my opinion. Indies actually need more power for the same game as a big studio, because they may very well have less time for testing/optimization than a big studio "should" have.

Completely true. I had a full-time job at a professional studio, spending 6 months staring at platform-specific profilers, re-writing code to save mere GPU cycles here and there just to squeeze a few more milliseconds worth of work into a frame... Indies can't afford to hire a specialist with that kind of focus.