ARM at GDC 2013
March 27, 2013, Game Developers Conference, San Francisco—We talked ARM about breaking out technology for gamers. The growing move to mobile platforms means that more of their underlying IP is being used for the casual, and mobile games.
Native gaming on the GPU enables high resolution and activity games on mobile. The potential for large numbers of particles and high polygon counts means that the display environment is becoming more complex. The ability to download object for the games increased the challenges.
A number of companies are using ARM processors for their products, including Sony, Sharp, Samsung, LG, and the Google Nexus. In-game text or overlays need integrated anti-aliasing to work well. The embedded engines provide the compute power to manage all aspects of the mobile gaming experience. The CPU-GPU systems are capable of supporting high-resolution graphics and full motion actions within a very small power budget. The latest Mali GPU supports physics simulations and works with the emerging middleware for easier software integration.
We are in the early days for AI in GPUs, so they are starting some prototyping work with Autodesk and Havok and others to create some AI middleware. The whole area needs a way to partition the game and profile the software loading. To develop AI-based games requires a complete set of tools.
The available toolset includes debuggers at the code level, graphical UI, stream lines and graphics support, support for Mali, and management tools for optimizing performance and efficiency within the cores. Available game engines can operate with the integrated software environment for better overall organization.
The tools also can check for available communications bandwidth and allow the developer to compare visual quality. Support includes a number of lessons on the Web in both English and Chinese. In addition, they have a developer site with other tools, examples, etc. for base functions and starting out operations. The tools operate under Windows and Linux, and are integrated with other developer tools. Android tools are available for direct compile functions.
