Day one of GDC 2016 has flown by in a whirlwind so I’m pausing for a minute to pop down my highlights. As a relative newby to the graphics industry this is my first time at GDC (and in the US!) so I’m keen to share my thoughts.
Grey skies didn't last long
After an uncharacteristically soggy start to the week, the Californian sun has once again blessed us with its presence for the opening of the world’s largest professionals only game dev event. Even in the queue at passport control it was apparent just how huge GDC really is, with every second person seemingly citing it as their reason for entering. Sure enough, people turned out in their thousands today for the first day of the expo. Companies from all over the world and in every game-related field are here to flaunt the latest and greatest in game development. ARMed (sorry) with piles of ARM powered Bluetooth controllers to give away (come find me to get yours!) I took to the stand excited to see exactly how it would unfold.
Rocking the Bluetooth controller look
Booth Bits
On ARM booth 1624 we started the day with a fantastic talk from Tony Chia of Nibiru, who presented their interactive SDK and VR ROM for mobile and announced the launch of the ARM & Nibiru Joint Innovation Lab. Hot on their heels were Playcanvas with some great insight into optimizing WebGL for mobile GPUs and their free, open source game engine specially optimized for ARM Mali, the world’s number 1 mobile GPU. Talks were even more popular than expected as we’re giving away an awesome Pipo P4 tablet after every single one!
One very happy winner!
Epic Games and Samsung Mobile joined us bright and early to present an amazing sponsored session case study around the recently released Vulkan API from Khronos. They provided a deep dive on the features of Vulkan and exactly how it works on mobile as well as all the benefits to performance that can be achieved when using it with Unreal Engine 4, allowing developers to reach new heights of graphics quality on mobile.
All the Rage
GDC veterans tell me that Virtual Reality is the tech on everyone’s lips this year with a bigger presence than ever seen before. It was of course a hot topic for us too with ARM Senior Graphics Architect & VR whitepaper author Sam Martin sharing his expertise on the dos and don’ts of mobile VR and exactly what it takes to create a super experience. Seats were at a premium for this one with people crowded round to make sure they didn’t miss out. Right after that came nDreams’ Patrick O’Luanaigh with his key VR development tips and where he sees the future of the industry.
Sam Martin sharing the tricks of the mobile VR trade
Some of our other in-house experts also took to our on-stand lecture theatre to share their findings on porting an engine to the Vulkan API and making sure you get the full benefit of its enhanced features for mobile. Our engineers also shared some up to the minute techniques for rendering shadows, stereo reflections and heaps of other cool effects used in the super popular Ice Cave VR demo.
Playtime
As if that wasn’t enough, our stand is packed to bursting with awesome demos from some of our key partners. Umbra’s demo blew my mind with its amazing use of automatic occlusion culling, visibility-based level of detail and 3D content streaming to take 30GB of original source data and let you fly over cities (and pretend to be Superman, obviously.)
Snail Games also kicked butt with the latest updates to their mobile kung-fu games Age of Wushu Dynasty and Taichi Panda and kept us big kids entertained for hours!
If you’ve missed out on any of this, or won’t be able to make everything you want to see from ARM over the next few days, never fear! As in previous years we’ll be hosting the Mali Graphics Week from Monday 18th April to bring you all of the talks and presentations from GDC as well as a whole host of new blogs and articles covering everything you might have missed.
Fancy a brand new Samsung S7? Join our Mali Graphics Week Thunderclap to be in with a chance to win!
Right now I’m off to soak my tired feet before venturing out to check out the San Fran nightlife. More on GDC 2016 tomorrow and if you’re around, come and say hi on ARM booth 1624!
