So, what's new at GDC 2014?

If you're looking for a short summary of the ARM-related news from GDC, look no further than here! The hugely exciting Expo Floor has opened, the attendees are flooding in, the major announcements have all been made and we have a round up of it here just for you:

OpenGL® ES 3.1

OpenGL ES is the API that is used in nearly all the world's mobile devices and on Monday it was announced that the latest version, through its inclusion of features such as compute shaders and indirect drawing, will enable developers to use cutting edge features traditionally reserved for the PC space on mobile devices.Tom Olson, our Director of Graphics Research and more importantly in this matter, Chair of the OpenGL ES Working Group, has already written a great blog celebrating this subject, Here comes OpenGL® ES 3.1! and presented on the subject to a large audience at GDC yesterday in his talk "Getting the most out of OpenGL ES". For those wanting to see a visual example of what OpenGL ES 3.1 can do, ARM released this demo earlier in the week and has been showing it on the booth:

For more information on the OpenGL ES 3.1 API, check out the Khronos Website.

Geomerics Global Illumination technology is going....well, even more global

Whilst the ARM team was settling into its second day at the Smartphone Summit, our yearly warm up for the main booth, Geomerics was at the heart of one of the biggest announcements of the week for worldwide game developers. Unity 5, the award winning, multiplatform engine, announced on Tuesday that amid the number of new features that will make the creation of stunning games that much easier, its key update was the integration of Enlighten™ technology, the real-time lighting system developed by Geomerics. This is fantastic news for the gaming industry as it will enable the vast numbers of developers who use Unity to do things like animate lights, generate emissive material properties and control the environment lighting in real-time. Enlighten is the only real-time global illumination technology optimized to deliver fully dynamic lighting in game on today's PCs, consoles, and mobile platforms.

Geomerics' Transporter demo, being shown on the ARM Booth at GDC, showcases the latest features of Enlighten technology and the beautiful lighting effects that can be achieved on mobile.

Cocos2D-x introduces 3D

The ARM Booth is hosting a great selection of partners this year and one of them, Cocos2D-x, announced last week their new Cocos3D-x Engine. Cocos3d-x is a multi-platform game framework for building 3D games and applications using Objective-C, based on the popular cocos2d-x engine which has played a part in over 1000 games. Its 3D application development framework is for iOS, Android, and MacOSX platforms.

Epic Games releases subscription model

We managed to catch up with Epic Games on their booth and they discussed the new subscription for Unreal Engine 4 - all of its leading-edge tools, features and complete C++ source code are becoming more readily available to the entire development community, no matter what their size, budget or aspiration.

Meanwhile, on the ARM Booth

Yesterday saw the Expo Floor open up to all attendees and the ARM Booth buzzed with activity for the day. The ARM Lecture Theater, which continues over Thursday and Friday, offered valuable development tips and ideas to attendees with many of our partners joining us to give a talk on their mobile gaming solutions. The Gaming Wall saw avid gamers compete to get the fastest lap in the Sports Car Challenge whilst beautiful designs appeared on the Artist Competition wall. All in all it was a great day on the ARM Booth and I will have more news for you tomorrow!

Goo Technologies' Victor Sand wraps up a presentation on the ARM Lecture Theatre

Three attendees discover who is the fastest in the Sports Car Challenge car

Sylwester Bala is on hand to explain the features of Geomerics' Transporter demo

The demos on the ARM wall exemplify how ARM is expanding the mobile gaming experience