Over 25,000 game developers go yearly to San Francisco for the Game Developer Conference (GDC) in order to see and hear the latest features and capabilities of the game engines, games middleware, developer tools and hardware platforms.
At today’s Google Developers day it was announced that a whooping $7 billion revenue has been given to their app developers. And this is set to continue growing thanks to lower cost smartphones and tablets exposing millions of people of all ages and from all walks of life, to video games for the first time.
From a technical perspective, each year we are seeing, on average, a 30 to 50 per cent increase in the performance of mobile devices. The computational power of mobile GPUs is already largely on par with that of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. There are still challenges around, like the availability of memory bandwidth, but ARM is developing techniques to overcome these which developers can reach via our sample code, tutorials, tools and developer guides available at our developer portal, and our latest demos of these techniques will be shown and explained during our GDC talks.
The GDC developer audience have extremely divers educational needs, from the game artist creating the game assets, the visual environment and characters, to the game developers using a specific game engine or middleware, and to the developers designing their own game engine or not using any. Therefore, we have shaped our developer tutorials and resources to fit the audience diversity.
At GDC 2015, we start our talk sessions with “Unreal Engine 4: Mobile Graphics on ARM CPU and GPU architecture”, showing first of all, how Epic Games’ game engine has been ported into the latest ARMv8 architecture, showcasing the results with a bespoke game demo from Epic Games called Moon Temple.
For game developers, the ARMv8 architecture mainly translates to porting their game to a 64-bit OS, and the latest Android “L” already includes 64-bit support. Apple has also mandated the support of 64-bit for all new iOS 8 apps. The session continues with the tile-based ARM® Mali™ GPU architecture, showing how to reduce external memory bandwidth by keeping memory transactions localized to fast on-chip memory. The light bloom effect of the Moon Temple demo is developed using that technique, implemented via the Khronos OpenGL® ES extension “Shader Pixel Local Storage”. Other sample code using this extension are also available here. Another highlight of the talk is the ASTC integration into Unreal Engine 4. ASTC is a texture compression standard developed by ARM and adopted by Khronos. ASTC allows free choice of multiple bit rates across all supported input texture formats, from LDR to HDR formats, as well as the ability to compress 3D textures. At our developer portal we have sample code and further tutorials on it.
Furthermore, the Enlighten middleware by Geomerics, an ARM company enables dynamic global illumination and is also available pre-integrated into Unreal Engine. A full session is dedicated to it which reveals the latest features and advances in Enlighten, and the collaboration with Unreal Engine and Unity.
Another hot topic for developers is to learn how best to use the latest API features and for mobile and embedded devices, OpenGL ES is the 3D graphics API of choice. Our talk Unleash the benefits of OpenGL ES 3.1 and Android Extension Pack (AEP),focuses on the main new highlight which is compute shaders, allowing the GPU to be used for general-purpose computing. Previously, developers had to learn a different API (such as OpenCL™) if they wanted to use GPU Compute. The session covers compute shader techniques and the best coding practises on Mali Midgard GPUs. It showcases a few of the sample codes which are already available at our developer portal. The other highlight of the talk is the Android Extension Pack (AEP) and its best coding practices. AEP requires OpenGL ES 3.1 and it is an optional feature in the latest Android “L” OS release. AEP enables around 20 other extensions, including tessellation, geometry shaders and ASTC.
Tools are key for developers so that they can debug and profile their code, finding out where the performance bottlenecks are so they can optimize their application. At the talk How to Optimize your Mobile Game with ARM Tools and Practical Examples the Mali Graphics Debugger (MGD) and DS-5 Streamline are shown, with further live sessions at our ARM booth lecture theatre. The MGD traces all the API calls that the graphics application makes; in particular it supports OpenGL ES 2.0, 3.x and EGL. The tool is complementary to DS-5 Streamline, which gives a system wide view of the performance of the application. MGD v2.1 has just been launched to be showcased at GDC 2015, and the key features include the support for Android 64-bit targets and its capability of tracing the Android Extension Pack functions.
Last but not least, there is a talk session aimed at Unity developers: Enhancing your Unity Mobile Games. Unity is the most widely used game engine, and from our developer surveys from developer events and Mali Developer Center, we understand that up to 50% of game developers use Unity. The session is given jointly with Unity and RealtimeUK, the company who created the 3D assets for the brand new Ice Cave demo, premiering this week on the ARM booth. Developers will learn the differences when developing for mobile, as well as the bottlenecks they might encounter and how to overcome them, referring to all the work done in our ARM Guide to Unity. It goes on to cover the use of the local cubemap technique for reflections, and then, inspired by the technique, we show a new way of rendering dynamic soft shadows in real-time, which is one of the key additions on our ARM Guide to Unity refresh to be released later this year. 