It’s Friday and GDC17 is officially almost over for another year. After information overload from a host of brilliant talks and speakers it was back to the ARM booth to check out our demos, catch up with some partners and share our Dev tools with the masses. The guys have done an awesome job this year and the stand looks great. We’ve been giving away pins and t-shirts featuring our CircuitVR robot friend and people have been queueing round the stand to grab one. The last two nights we’ve also had a raffle, with tickets given out to anyone we’ve chatted with throughout the week. Whether you’ve attended a talk, rocked up to the stand, or just had a play with our VR headsets, you’ve been in with a chance to win and we’ve given away Amazon Echos to our lucky winners.
Our new CircuitVR demo is a particular hit, with our robot guide taking you through the workings of a real mobile SOC. From a spaceship portal you can climb right inside the tech that makes your phone work and see how it all comes together. Guided navigation ports you to the next section with helpful info from our little robot friend, explaining what you’re seeing and what it’s for. Whilst super cool though, there are other purposes to all the hard work the demo team have put into this. For one thing, it shows the benefits of Multiview for foveated rendering, or rendering the central section of the view (that’s visible to our fovea) in high resolution, with the peripheral area in lower resolution. The ability to render these marginally different views simultaneously saves a huge amount of rendering work and therefore bandwidth, and as we know from our talks this week, this is vital. Also packed in are examples of MSAA, reducing visual artefacts at almost no cost to performance, and Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression, providing higher quality compression and saving power.
ARM Mali GPU’s are now in 50% of mobile VR devices worldwide and we’re always excited to show both Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream on stand, demonstrating the benefits of mobile VR to consumer uptake that we learnt about in Wednesday’s sessions. Some of the first Daydream ready devices are based on Mali’s Bifrost architecture so it’s great to see the performance and efficiency improvements in action providing a truly immersive experience.
We also have an HDR demo, showing the difference the greater range and depth of colours can make to the content you view. With truer blacks the contrast is crisper than you can possibly imagine and is definitely set to change TV forever. Our tools team have been hard at work as ever too, showcasing the optimization benefits of MGD in both Unity and Unreal Engines, helping developers at all levels improve their applications with full support for Vulkan and VR.
Remember the Vulkan /Open Gl ES comparison video from yesterday’s talk? That’s here too, and on the Unity stand, showing just how many people and partners are invested in bringing the benefits of Vulkan to more and more developers, saving power and producing higher quality content within the thermal limits of a mobile phone. We’re also showing a similar comparison on one of our own demos to demonstrate that the gains from Vulkan aren’t limited to one type of content but that with even a very basic intro to the API you too can reap the Vulkan benefits.
On the stand behind us, Ximmerse are showing a great VR demo on ARM Mali powered Samsung Gear VRs, with peripherals added in at very low cost to the user but with awesome results. Our graphics guru Roberto was rocking out to it now that the pressure of his talk is done and dusted for another year.
ARM partner Qualcomm have also got some Power Ranger action happening next door, with a lifesize power suit and matching demo. Our friends from Epic games are predictably Epic and have a queue halfway round the block for their giveaways and gameplay time.
Oculus are always a huge presence here and this year is no different, although it is nice to be able to see the smiling faces on-stand rather than last year’s somewhat intimidating giant black box of a booth.
With that, I’m off to hobble back round for a final lap of all the things I haven’t yet had a chance to play with before we prepare to pack up for another GDC. We’ll be back next year so until then, Dev well and join my Graphics & Multimedia newsletter for all the latest!