Gone are the days when gaming was the sole domain of your PC or console, these days just about everyone with a phone has gamed on the go in some form or another. The earliest iterations of mobile gaming were run on the CPU and hit our hands with the likes of the near-indestructible Nokia 6110. This was the first handset to come with Snake pre-installed and we all thought it was awesome (Ok I’m showing my age, don’t judge.) For those of you considerably younger than myself; the original version was very simple in terms of graphics, gameplay and just about everything else, as you can see below. It wasn’t very long, however, before the popularity of even the most basic mobile gaming became apparent and the range and complexity of available titles began to grow.
(click to see the whole game complete!)
The first 3D mobile games emerged in around 2003, but devices capable of properly supporting 3D graphics took a little longer so 3D gaming on mobile didn’t become widely possible until around 2005.* Add to that the massive range of handset manufacturers and devices hitting the market and it becomes apparent just how much more complex it was to develop content that would work across multiple platforms. OpenGL ES, a subset of the OpenGL graphics API targeted specifically at embedded systems such as mobile, was also launched in 2003 but of course not adopted immediately, and for some time the majority of mobile games were still created with APIs that target only the CPU. By 2006, when ARM® acquired Falanx and ARM Mali™ became a reality, subsequent iterations of OpenGL ES were beginning to focus specifically on 3D graphics functionality and GPUs in mobile were becoming more prevalent as manufacturers recognised the need for advanced graphics handling. Later additions from OpenGL ES 3.0 added post-process HDR, depth of field and bloom. Bandwidth reduction technologies like ARM’s Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) also became available and provided enormous improvements, growing the quality and variety of games we could support on mobile. Mobile gaming was well and truly here to stay.
The very first Mali-based phone was released in 2007. The device was an LG KU990, or ‘Viewty,’ and the game was Space Command Platoon, custom made by LG and embedded on the device. You can see below the early iteration of 3D graphics and the then-novel stylus controls. This was advanced content but you can see just by looking at it how much has changed in the subsequent decade since its release.
From there, the Mali-400 became the first multi-core GPU and helped propel the mobile gaming revolution to the mainstream. If you knew you could allow a single core to run the majority of the required data for your scene, you could use the additional cores to add complexity to that same scene. Still the most popular mobile GPU for ultra-low power devices today, Mali-400 was the first in a long line of ever advancing graphics technology from ARM. Today the ARM Mali Multimedia Suite provides GPUs from the ultra-low power, wearable and IoT end of the spectrum, right up to the highest performing Mali-G71, powering the next generation of smartphones and VR devices. VR gaming is one of the more demanding technologies with arguably double the processing requirements due to the need to render content for each eye separately, as well as the other requirements we’ve talked about before. Mobile adoption of technology such as this simply wouldn’t have been possible without the ever advancing processing power of GPUs like Mali. It’s hard to imagine the industry would have been prepared to take a risk on standalone, customs SOCs for VR without the ability to launch on existing mobile platforms.
Even outside of VR though, mobile gaming continues to grow in complexity as consumers demand more from their mobiles. We’re no longer happy with the simplicity of Snake and instead expect console quality, AAA gaming on mobile. This trickle-down effect of console and PC games to mobile brings with it advanced processing requirements and a huge amount of data. Part of our commitment to ensuring we can support the latest and greatest content on mobile means monitoring the requirements of mobile titles, with the likes of Jurassic World and Unkilled being amongst today’s most complex mobile games.
As content grows, so too does development expertise. The launch of the Khronos Group’s Vulkan API in 2016 ramped things up a level yet again. A lower level API, Vulkan allows the developer much closer control over which hardware runs which parts of the code. Whilst this added power can be risky, with more scope for things to go wrong, it also means more detailed optimizations are possible. This can provide advanced performance and greater battery life, another area that comes under serious pressure as games grow in complexity.
As this trend continues, so does our need to keep up, which is why with our next generations of GPUs we’re constantly seeking ever greater performance, balanced with superior energy efficiency in order to maximise the user experience and minimise costs for both partners and developers. By utilising the entire Mali Multimedia Suite of GPU, Video and Display processors, partners are beginning to harness even greater savings, making even the most demanding content a reality from mainstream mobile to superphone. With Mali shipping in more than a billion devices in 2016 alone, we’re already looking ahead to the technology that will support the next billion.
* http://www.pocketgamer.biz/feature/10719/a-brief-history-of-mobile-games-2006-squaring-the-3d-circle/
**By sylvainratton (LG Viewty) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons