The Arm booth at the Game Developer Conference (GDC) will be one of the first public showcases of the new OPPO Find X5 Pro Dimensity version. The premium smartphone is built on MediaTek’s Dimensity 9000 chipset, which is packed full of the latest and greatest Arm IP. This includes the Arm Cortex-X2 CPU alongside 3x Arm Cortex-A710 CPUs and 4x Arm Cortex-A510 CPUs, as well as a 10-core Arm Mali-G710 GPU.
When the Dimensity 9000 was first launched at the end of 2021, MediaTek made a big play (pun intended) on the chipset’s ability to bring the very best graphics and gaming features to premium mobile. One of these features was its brand-new Vulkan ray tracing SDK, which enables developers to bring exciting new graphics techniques and visual enhancements to Android gaming applications. This has been incorporated by OPPO into its Find X5 Pro Dimensity version smartphone to enable more realistic graphical content via the device.
On Arm’s GDC booth, ray traced content will be displayed on the OPPO Find X5 Pro Dimensity version, with Arm Mobile Studio providing a wide range of performance data – in the same way it does for any other Android content. Developers will be able to view what is happening at an SoC level, including the impact of workloads on everything from GPU and CPU boundness to draw calls, texture look-ups and more.
Ray tracing is a very compute-intensive workload, one of the heaviest around, particularly on mobile. The GDC demo will show Arm Mobile Studio performing crucial performance analysis across compute-intensive gaming workloads, including ray traced content.
Firstly, a reminder about Arm Mobile Studio. Put simply it is a valuable suite of optimization tools for mobile games, providing developers with early and frequent testing around gaming and graphics performance. This helps anyone involved in game development to predict and improve the efficiency of mobile games, with Arm Mobile Studio quickly identifying areas that can be optimized to reduce profiling time. There is also a professional edition that can be integrated easily for efficient iterations to the code base during development. Alongside the free debug and analysis tools, Arm also offers helpful training and advice around GPU and graphics fundamentals, such as the recent 'Mobile Magnificence' series.
As a performance analyzer, Arm Mobile Studio can handle the most compute intensive mobile gaming workloads. This is helping multiple game studios, like King with its Crash Bandicoot: On the Run! game, deliver a cross-platform gaming strategy and participate in the growing trend of bringing more complex AAA gaming to mobile. According to an Arm-commissioned report by Newzoo, the revenue share of AAA mobile games is rising across key regions worldwide. In China, these grew from 42 percent in 2016 to 70 percent in 2020 in China, while in North America AAA these grew from 6 percent in 2016 to 33 percent in 2020.
While ray traced gaming content is not present across mobile devices, the emergence of new SoCs, like Dimensity 9000, and smartphones, like the OPPO Find X5 Pro Dimensity version, that are capable of ray tracing will start to give the ecosystem the foundation and motivation to explore ray tracing techniques for their content. This will only advance in the future as these techniques evolve and more mobile devices provide further ray tracing support and capabilities.
Ray tracing is a computer graphics technique that provides more realistic gaming experiences. It does this through generating more accurate lighting and shadows by modelling the paths that individual light rays take around a game scene. As you can see in the video below, there is a noticeable difference in the visual quality when ray tracing techniques are used.
It is important that Arm Mobile Studio can analyze compute intensive workloads, like ray traced content. Ray tracing techniques can use significant power and energy, with the profiling via Arm Mobile Studio showing areas for efficiency improvements to facilitate longer gameplay while running ray traced content. Moreover, as an increasing number of developers start creating ray traced content, there will be greater demand for performance analysis tools, like Arm Mobile Studio, to analyze this compute-intensive technique.
As I described in a blog in September 2021, Arm is continuing to hone ray tracing capabilities in our Mali GPU offering. Mali-G710 already enables software-based ray tracing support, but expect more ray tracing developments with future GPU launches….
Arm’s partners for the GDC demo – OPPO and MediaTek – are excited about the future of ray tracing and its ability to provide more immersive and realistic gaming experiences on mobile.
Here’s what they had to say:
“MediaTek’s Dimensity 9000 mobile SoC is built for full flagship experiences, including mobile gaming. Its ray tracing capabilities deliver more advanced, realistic and immersive gaming content on mobile,” said Nathan Li, Senior Director of MediaTek’s Wireless Communications Business Unit. “The OPPO Find X5 Pro – the first mobile device with our flagship Dimensity 9000 chip – showcases a myriad of high-end consumer experiences and ray tracing capabilities on mobile.” “Arm’s Mali GPUs and MediaTek’s Dimensity 9000 SoC will dramatically improve the performance of ray-tracing technology on mobile devices”, said Jane Tian, Head of the Graphics Product at the OPPO US research center. "The implementation of ray tracing is certainly an exciting prospect for the mobile gaming industry, however, it is extremely challenging to implement real-time ray tracing in power-constrained devices. In a joint effort with Arm and MediaTek, OPPO will continue to devote itself to technology research and development in the field of graphics. We'll further expand the gaming ecosystem and jointly promote the mobile ray tracing technology to enable the ultimate mobile gaming experience for both developers and users.”
“MediaTek’s Dimensity 9000 mobile SoC is built for full flagship experiences, including mobile gaming. Its ray tracing capabilities deliver more advanced, realistic and immersive gaming content on mobile,” said Nathan Li, Senior Director of MediaTek’s Wireless Communications Business Unit. “The OPPO Find X5 Pro – the first mobile device with our flagship Dimensity 9000 chip – showcases a myriad of high-end consumer experiences and ray tracing capabilities on mobile.”
“Arm’s Mali GPUs and MediaTek’s Dimensity 9000 SoC will dramatically improve the performance of ray-tracing technology on mobile devices”, said Jane Tian, Head of the Graphics Product at the OPPO US research center. "The implementation of ray tracing is certainly an exciting prospect for the mobile gaming industry, however, it is extremely challenging to implement real-time ray tracing in power-constrained devices. In a joint effort with Arm and MediaTek, OPPO will continue to devote itself to technology research and development in the field of graphics. We'll further expand the gaming ecosystem and jointly promote the mobile ray tracing technology to enable the ultimate mobile gaming experience for both developers and users.”
To see the demo for yourselves and learn more about ray tracing on mobile and Arm Mobile Studio, then why not visit the Arm booth at GDC? This is located at #S756 in the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
Learn more about ray tracing on mobile in this blog.
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