Game development moves at an incredibly fast pace, and with looming deadlines and the ever-closer publishing date, the focus is – quite rightly – on shipping titles on time on existing platforms. With such a profound focus on ‘now’, the challenge for the developer community is looking past the horizon to see what new mobile hardware will be available in the future.
At a recent event in San Francisco, Arm launched the new premium suite of mobile IP, which will deliver significant performance improvements in smartphones and Arm powered laptops. The launch included:
New devices based on Arm's suite of premium IP will be available in early 2019. For the developer community, these types of announcements signal the progress and innovation in mobile technology and what they should be prepared for in the next generation of devices.
Below is a video from Android Authority's Gary Sims (@garysims) who explains how this new IP will affect future technologies.
Mobile game developers aren’t the only ones who will benefit. These next generation announcements will enable a new generation of always-on, always-connected PCs, providing more performant machines for the Windows community to work with. Take a look at the current Microsoft Windows on Arm developer guides.
The strength of Arm's ecosystem is a key factor in delivering these next generation devices and we continue to work hard to develop and nurture a broad range of customers. Some of our key partners were featured as part of our premium launch event including Microsoft, STRIVR, Google, and Unity.
Unity’s Ralph Hauwert attended our premium launch in San Francisco.
Unity are a valued partner who we work with regularly when it comes to all things related to game development, from general optimization to Vulkan. We regularly attend Unity’s Unite event series all over the world.
At the start of May our team exhibited at Unite Beijing where we showcased our convergence of mobile technologies demo where Augmented Reality (AR) meets ML with interactive graphics based on object detection, made possible by integrating Arm NN into Unity. This shows the potential of new compelling use cases that developers can already implement in their games by combining these novel technologies.
A month later we exhibited at Unite Berlin sharing insight into game optimization and the potential for enhanced effects even on mid-range smartphones, to help developers deliver even higher-fidelity content to a larger user base.
To our delight both these events were busy and full of insightful talks, exhibitors and attendees. One aspect that we see increasing is the amount of engagement from Unity developers around mobile gaming, the awareness of who Arm is, and the resources we have available to help them to get their games running as performant as possible on Arm-based devices.
Pablo Fraile, Director of Ecosystems at Arm, identifies the Unite event series as a key initiative for Arm in the ecosystem outreach program for 2018.
"Some of the world's most exciting content is being created on mobile using Unity, and the developer ecosystem team loves coming to Unite to talk to other game developers and exchange best practices. We're looking forward to sharing our contribution to mobile gaming performance."
The latest advances in mobile hardware performance has brought new capabilities for high-fidelity and compelling games. With the mobile game market’s notable growth worldwide and increasing demand for AAA games; creating performant, visually-stunning content has never been so important.
One of the reasons we attend events like Unite is the great opportunity provided to us to give talks on how we ease the burden of game development for developers. You might have seen an excellent blog from Attilio Provenzano on our collaboration with Nordeus and how we’re helping to optimize their games for mainstream devices.
At GDC, as well as both Unite Beijing and Unite Berlin, we gave talks to developers on this topic. For each talk the room was packed full of developers who took pictures of each slide and had plenty of questions. This confirms to us that we are addressing the right pain points for developers as they want to know how to solve these problems with as little effort as possible. As we don't have any games of our own it is down to the great work Nordeus have done optimizing their games, with “Spellsouls: Duel of Legends” being a fantastic case study for this topic.
Arm and Nordeus explained how to profile your game using the Arm tools, alongside identifying and resolving pipeline bottlenecks with targeted optimization (e.g. shaders).
The presentation will look at how to optimize the rendering pipeline and budget for efficient post-processing effects such as bloom at high FPS.
Arm has a suite of graphics and software tools that can enable you to get the most out of your application on whatever device you are running it on. There are many of these tools on our developer website, but here are the three that could be of immediate use for a graphics developer;
Mali Graphics Debugger – Allows developers to trace OpenGL ES, Vulkan and OpenCL API calls in their application and understand frame-by-frame the effect on the application to help identify possible issues.
Mali Offline Compiler - Compiles vertex, fragment, compute, geometry shaders written in the OpenGL ES Shading Language (ESSL). It can also compile shaders written in the Vulkan SPIR-V binary format and kernels written in OpenCL C.
Arm DS-5 Streamline – The Arm DS-5 Development Studio Streamline performance analyzer enables you to get the best out of your system’s resources and create high performance, energy efficient products. Its innovative user interface brings together system performance metrics, software tracing, statistical profiling and power measurement to present you with a system dashboard where you can quickly identify code hotspots, system bottlenecks and other unintended effects of your code or the system architecture.
For more detailed blogs on Arm’s software tools please look at our Software Tools community.
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