Just as September marks the turn of the year for schoolchildren; April marks the turn of the year for taxes; so too does the Game Developers Conference mark the climax of the year for anyone in the gaming industry. ARM is no different. The work of our ecosystem team begins and ends in March, with demos being finalized, developer guides written off and tools being released all for this time. With GDC coinciding with MWC in Barcelona this year, mobile game developers can definitely expect a week full of exciting announcements.
In the field of mobile game development, ARM recognizes the challenges. While mobile devices have the biggest reach of any gaming platform, the thermal and battery constraints have not traditionally made them a straightforward target for visually stunning games. However, increasingly advanced processors and energy efficient technologies are hitting the market each year and with IP such as the ARM® Mali™-T880 GPU and ARM Cortex®-A72 processors in the pipeline, designed specifically to deliver high-end gaming, tomorrow's premium mobile experiences are being redefined.
This year we have a stunning lineup of new demos that form a one-stop-shop for cutting-edge mobile development techniques, all based on the latest hardware. If you’re starting to work with APIs such as OpenGL® ES 3.1 or WebGL, come and find out how to use compute shaders for occlusion culling, or how WebGL games can rival the visual quality of those built in OpenGL ES. For those working with popular game engines such as Unity or Unreal, we have brand new demos featuring battery-saving techniques such as Pixel Local Storage and ASTC as well as tips for driving up visual quality in mobile games using Enlighten’s global illumination solution, reflections, refractions and shadows. 64-bit mobile gaming is now present in leading engines and we will be showcasing the performance improvements available both on the booth and in our sponsored sessions.
This week we announced updates to three of our most popular Mali graphics tools including a plug-in to Unreal Engine 4 for the Offline Shader Compiler. The Offline Shader Compiler allows you to analyze your materials and get advanced mobile statistics while previewing the number of arithmetic, load & store and texture instructions in your code. The OpenGL ES Emulator receives support for geometry and tessellation shaders and enables users to start developing for the Android Extension Pack (AEP) as well as OpenGL ES 2.0, 3.0 and 3.1. The Mali Graphics Debugger has gained support for 64-bit Android, improved live shader editing and now enables the Android Extension Pack (AEP) to be traced. The upgrades to the Emulator and the Debugger are available for download now; the Offline Shader Compiler plug-in is being previewed at GDC.
Joining us on the ARM booth will be partners who share our ambition to make the production of high-quality mobile games as easy as possible. Cocos2d-x, who recently announced the integration of ARM’s DS-5 Streamline into the Cocos Code IDE to enable developers to simply optimize their games, will be sharing their extremely popular engine with attendees. Tencent, the world-leading, free-to-play publisher and #1 brand in China will join the ARM booth with their innovative titles for mobile. Simplygon’s automatic 3D asset optimization middleware is ideal for increasing the performance of your mobile game. For those facing the challenge of smartphone market diversity, Testin’s quality assurance testing suite is a blessing for confirming the performance of your application across a variety of devices. PlayCanvas’ ever-popular WebGL game engine that’s free, open source and backed by amazing developer tools will be showing a new demo featuring some well known ARM characters!
All of these demonstrations will be accompanied by live sessions and in-depth explanations by the engineers who developed them on the in-booth ARM lecture theatre. The full schedule and more information about ARM at GDC is available at Mali Developer Center. We look forward to seeing you on the ARM booth #1624 next week!