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Graphics, Gaming, and VR blog What excellence looks like in mobile graphics optimization: Arm Mali Graphics Championship 2021
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What excellence looks like in mobile graphics optimization: Arm Mali Graphics Championship 2021

Ramnath Swamy
Ramnath Swamy
October 19, 2021

The summer of 2021 was an exciting time for us at Arm and for many of our partners from game studios around the world. We ran a graphics optimization competition for games studios, the Arm Mali Graphics Championship, and the winners have been announced in our global developer conference, Arm DevSummit 2021. In this competition the contestants had to profile our sample Android APK, using the free Arm Mobile Studio tool suite. Our  winners are, first place: Soowan Park from NCSOFT, second place: David Sena from NaturalMotion (Zynga) and third place: Joao Pedro Jorge from King Studios. They are taking home impressive prize packages worth $15000, $9000 and $6000 for winning the top three places in this championship. Congratulations to our winners who have not only shown their expertise in using Arm Mobile Studio, but also their impressive approaches to performance optimization.

Why did Arm run this Championship?

There are two fundamental reasons why we ran this championship.

Firstly, Arm has always invested in an ecosystem in which optimizing for Mali GPUs is made easy and rewarding for both individual developers and their institutions. Whether they sought to learn a new skill, discover a new development tool or simply refresh their current skills, our participants confirmed that the championship was a great motivation to do that.

Secondly, we aim to continuously validate the effectiveness of our performance analysis tools and developer education, ensuring that less experienced developers can easily use the tools and apply best practice. The Championship was an effective way to do that, by observing the contestants.

Voice of the winners

Since launching the competition, many of our development partners have been keen to know how it has been going. Well, I think that this is best answered by our contestants themselves and we have invited our three winners to share their experience with us.

First place champion:

“The Championship was a fun way to put some of my skills into practice and I learned a lot more about the optimization process and Mobile Studio from doing it. In fact, I had just a couple of days to spend on my submission which was right before the deadline but luckily, this was enough time to get comfortable with the tools and to spot the graphics issues. I managed to apply some of the tips I heard from the optimization webinar which Arm ran earlier this year and some of the other useful materials on Arm Mali.

As we all know, finding bottlenecks or problem spot is part of the most important things for optimization and this process is kind of difficult especially on mobile. Regardless, Arm Mobile Studio makes this process easy, which makes me use it very often. I could see all the necessary information such as API Trace, Shader Counter, Render State, HW Counter, and so on, using Arm Mobile Studio.

It was a fun experience and very helpful. “

 Arm Mali Championship, first prize winner, Soowan Park, team lead, NCSOFT

Second place:

“I always look for exciting graphics profiling tools that allow me to optimize my work and Arm’s Mobile Studio has really emerged as one of those solutions,” said David Sena,  Principal Graphics Software Engineer at NaturalMotion.

“The opportunity to compete and to be placed second against top global software engineering talent in Arm’s Mali Graphics Competition is an incredible career experience.   And, it encourages me to keep challenging myself to develop the best possible graphics for NaturalMotion games.”


Arm Mali Championship, second prize winner, David Sena, Principal Graphics Software Engineer, NaturalMotion

Third place:

"Arm Mali is an important GPU for King so a challenge like this was a great opportunity to learn more. In addition to the invaluable information from Streamline, we ended up digging deeper into Graphics Analyzer and complementing gaps in other more generic tools we also frequently use.

We are already regular users of the Arm Mobile Studio tools and so this was an obvious way for us to look for inspiration on how we can take performance  evaluation further and explore some of the newer developments.”

 Arm Mali Championship, third prize winner, Joao Pedro Jorge, Principal Graphics Developer, King

As much as we challenged our contestants, it was equally hard work for our judges to choose our winners, involving the use of very detailed scoring sheets. Our chosen three eventually stood out as top performers in this championship and are no doubt great assets to their organizations. Indeed, the quality of submissions was so high that we are awarding consolation prizes to more contestants. We also want to thank everyone who took the time to enter. We will share more details about all the issues we planted in the sample game and our judges’ tips for solving them in a follow-up report publishing shortly. Overall, our contestants’ success has been a great validation of the efforts we have undertaken to improve our tools. However, the new targets we have set for our tools roadmaps and developer engagement in the future are even higher. We give you a sneak preview of that here.

What next for Mobile Studio and performance optimization on Mali?

Another very exciting contribution to the Android ecosystem from Arm is yet to come. We are bringing new frame profiling capability to Arm Mobile Studio in 2022, with Frame Advisor capability. This is being developed ground-up and will be based on all the Arm Mali and graphics API best practices we have shared in our developer education. You can expect Frame Advisor to provide easier insight into key evaluation areas such as frame graph, the construction of each render pass and performance details for each draw call. We are building Frame Advisor to maximize its ease of use, even by those who are not graphics experts and to enable time savings for developers and their studios, through automated analysis. We continue with our developer engagement and are delighted to support developers with ongoing game reviews, dedicated Q&A sessions for studios, one-on-one training, and webinars. 2022 is likely to bring another Arm Mali Graphics Championship and even many new ways of us engaging with you, game developers. If you want to be part of these engagements or have any feedback on what we do or how we engage with the Mali developer ecosystem, then let us know by emailing mobilestudio@arm.com or visiting our Graphics and gaming forum on Arm Community.

Anonymous
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