Hello and Happy New Year!
So, here we are at the beginning of another new year preparing for Mobile Game Forum (MGF) in the Centre of London. This event is well attended by developers, game engine providers, middleware experts, payment and analytics companies to list but a few. ARM will be there to show cutting edge mobile hardware running the latest and greatest game related software created both internally and by our Ecosystem partners. Some of the demos we will be showing are:
Samsung Galaxy Note 3 running an internal demo developed to show the benefits of the new texture compression format ASTC. ASTC is the latest texture compression method adopted by the Khronos group as part of the new OpenGL® ES 3.0 standard. Using ASTC developers and artists are able to specify many parameters to ensure their content fits within the specified memory footprint while maintaining artefact free quality. Other positive side effects of better texture compression are less bandwidth consumption as textures are loaded from memory to the GPU thus yielding significant power savings and improving latency and load times. These power savings, quality improvements and load times are all viewable in our live demos at MGF. It’s easy to see why ARM designed and donated such an efficient texture compression algorithm to Khronos – we’re obsessed with power saving processing technology.
We will also be showing the new Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 edition which also contains the Samsung Exynos 5420 Octa processor. The Exynos 5420 contains eight ARM® Cortex CPU® cores and a six-core ARM Mali™-T628 GPU to drive the 2xHD resolution display (HD TVs are ~2MPix while the Note 10.1 drives ~4MPix). To show off the outstanding visual capabilities of this device we have been given a sneak preview of the new Vendetta Online developed by Guild Software. This new build makes use of very high quality 2048 x 2048 textures with advanced shader techniques to give a truly immersive gaming experience. This game originally started life as a PC title and has now been ported to mobile highlighting the narrowing gap between Mobile/Console/PC.
AmLogic have kindly equipped us with their new Set top Box prototype which contains their new AML 8726-M8 SoC which contains a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU running at 2GHz!! And a six core implementation of the ARM Mali-450 GPU clocked at an amazing 600MHz! I wonder what they have in mind for such a high performance chip? How about running 4K content at vSync frame rates! As shown at CES at the beginning of January we will be showing UHD 4K gaming and UI content developed by our Ecosystem partner Autodesk ScaleForm. I chose the fantastic Samsung UE55F9000 55” 4K TV to present this content. Did you know the UE55F900 also contains a Dual core Cortex-A15 CPU and quad-core Mali-T604 GPU, which I can only presume is used to render the high quality DTV User Interface. Could high quality games be coming to this platform too?
Also shown on our demo tabletop is the Samsung Chromebook running the Chrome web browser which was heavily optimised for Mali GPU-based devices by our driver team who worked closely with Google. To show off its performance I have chosen to run the new Flight Simulator demo kindly provided by our Ecosystem partner Goo Technologies. Try running this (http://photonfrog.com/tunnan/next/client.html) on your browser now and let me know if your computing device gets noisy and hot as the fan spins up. Note, the Chromebook doesn’t have a power inefficient cooling fan and its battery life is measured in days rather than hours.
We couldn’t attend a game event without showing the latest demo from Unity so I have chosen to show the Chase demo running on a standard Samsung Galaxy Note 3 as it supports OpenGL ES 3.0 right out of the box at Native 1080p Full HD resolution. This demo shows off more advanced graphics features than I have space for in this blog but be prepared to be wow’d by the sub surface scattering techniques heavily used in this tech demo. For more details of this particular demo have a look at its premier showing at SIGGRAPH 2013 where it was running on an upgraded Nexus 10.
Mobile Game Forum will also be the premier event for public showing of the latest technological advances from Geomerics with their Englighten Global Illumination middleware. This demo shows many dynamic light sources illuminating a scene in real time without any ambient lighting while also saving over 1Gb/second of memory bandwidth at HD resolution – yet another example of how ARM is driving down energy requirements while improving performance and user experience!
See you at the Mobile Game Forum show on 22nd and 23rd January .
Phill