Game development is a wonderful place to be. To create successful titles, there must be a fusion of inspiration, collaboration between disciplines and practical implementation. The correct mixture of these ingredients leads to games that entertain and bring and joy to the world. In other words, game development is a perfect place for innovation. In this blog, I explain why I feel it is important push the boundaries of gaming performance and innovation. Ray tracing, and in particular ray query, fits into the narrative.
During the past year, revenues in mobile games have taken a dip, but at the same time gaming downloads have increased. For any game in which advertising was a key part of the business model, it was not entirely unexpected that there would be such an impact. What is both interesting and inspiring is seeing gaming titles that have beaten the overall economic downward trend. These titles have identified commonalities that have allowed them to succeed in a challenging economy.
Across all video game genres, where we see continued success is titles that have invested in high production values, strong storylines, and deeper game design. As reported by Deconstructor of Fun, games like Diablo Immortal, Merge Mansion and Genshin Impact all performed well. It is also true that established IP have shown resilience, although for those licensing content one must factor in the costs associated with that. China has been ahead of the curve in this area for some time, with Honor of Kings being a prime example. For reasons to do with publishing, it has been important in China to think about longer form, high-quality content for the past few years. There are lessons for us all to learn here - these are higher quality, more engaging gaming and visual experiences, and less time minimizing download sizes.
The field of computer graphics is inspired by physical models of light and materials. There are various approximations to the complex problem of rendering a scene applied. These are often according to the strengths of graphics hardware and the knowledge we gain in how best to leverage it. Ray tracing is an intuitive model that allows us to think in terms of rays of light traversing a scene, interacting with matter and sources of light.
With all computations completed, we can render scenes that incorporate phenomena, such as global illumination, reflection, refraction, and shadows with high fidelity in a way that emerges quite naturally. The results are highly realistic and accurate gaming experiences, not entailing the workarounds that have been staples of real-time graphics for the last few decades.
Ray tracing itself can be broken down into two formalisms: ray query and ray pipeline. Ray query is an explicit model, by which we mean that generation of rays, intersections testing and resolving the results of these intersections are all handled within the shader. Ray pipeline differs in that the steps described are spilt into discrete stages. There is virtue in both models; however, you need to think carefully before adopting one or the other.
For those developing games, part of the challenge is to reconcile creative and technological goals against the state of the world. In particular, the question “How large is the audience that I can reach?” We are now standing in a place where a substantial audience can be found possessing mobile devices that support ray query. This audience is only likely to grow over time. Mediatek is one of Arm’s most forward-looking partners. Based on Arm’s 2022 Total Compute Solutions (TCS22) featuring the brand-new Arm Immortalis-G715 GPU, Mediatek has produced the Dimensity 9200 chipset. This powers some incredible flagship smartphones that have recently been announced, such as the vivo X90 Pro.
When we look across the entire mobile ecosystem, ray query has greater adoption than ray pipeline. We believe that this will remain true for the next few years. By the time developers are ready for global game launches, ray query support will be a simple fact of life. This will not be restricted to the premium and flagship end of the market. It is therefore essential to design around ray query.
Tencent Games have been looking hard at hybrid techniques in its amazing SmartGI solution. The company’s innovative techniques have allowed them to produce excellent performance from mobile hardware, with this achieving 60 fps and higher on mobile devices. You are going to hear more from Tencent Games about how this was achieved throughout the year ahead.
Sponza scene, courtesy of Intel Research, rendering more than 2M triangles and containing over 5K lights with SmartGI by Tencent Games
Victorian Train Station scene, lighting up a set of AAA quality assets and textures on Immortalis-G715 by SmartGI
“Delivering real-time ray tracing for interactive content on mobile devices – the dream came true with the Vulkan Ray Query API and arrival of flagship and premium smartphones powered by Arm Immortalis-G715. It has never been more challenging to tell the difference between the appearances of a game on desktop and mobile across all the fine details of shadows, ambient occlusion, reflections, and refractions. We can no longer wait to push the graphics of our next project to a whole new level by taking the adventure with ray query and Smart GI, and we are achieving the perfect balance of visual quality, performance, energy efficiency, and ease of development, with a very limited thermal and power budget.” Shun Cao, Head of Engine Technology, Tencent Games.
At Arm, we want to see everyone succeed in their journey with ray tracing whether that is smartphone manufacturers, game developers or players. Already we are seeing outstanding performance on Arm-based smartphone devices that are leading the pack on benchmark performance. vivo’s X90 Pro (V2242A), which is powered by the Dimensity 9200, is delivering an outstanding benchmark score of 3236 in Basemark’s “In Vitro” Mobile Ray Tracing benchmark thanks to the ray query feature enabled by Immortalis-G715. This is a result that Arm and our partners at Mediatek and vivo feel incredibly proud of.
We, alongside our partners and colleagues across the world, have been busy redefining mobile gaming experiences and cannot wait to share more with you at GDC 2023 and beyond. There are important techniques that can be used to optimize on mobile GPUs. You are going to hear more from our technical experts about how to succeed with ray query. Alongside some of Arm's gaming partners that are already delivering significant performance improvements on their gaming titles.
Read Arm’s new ‘Game Developer Tune Up Manual’ that has been launched in the run-up to GDC 2023. The manual features four free tools to help game developers build better games, faster, including a dedicated chapter on how to implement ray tracing techniques.
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Informative blog! Thanks Peter!