ALPHA | OPINION //COMMENT: SERVICES
Growing a supportive mobile dev ecosystem ARM’s Olga Kounevitch discusses how the firm helps devs get the most out of smart devices
Olga Kounevitch (above) is director of channel marketing at ARM
IT IS UNDENIABLE that mobile gaming has taken off exponentially and its potential is enormous. While PC and console gaming is available in more affluent areas of the world, mobile gaming is the more affordable option for the vast majority of the global population. Features once only available in premium smartphones are now trickling down into entry-level smart devices, such as the $20 Android smartphone predicted recently. These inexpensive devices are why the low and mid-range smartphone and tablet markets will more than double over the next five years, resulting in almost 2.5bn total mobile device shipments by 2018. This represents a vast opportunity to the game developer. It is estimated that by 2016, the mobile gaming market will be worth $24bn. At the time of writing this article, the research firm SuperData released a report stating that the Chinese market alone will double to $3bn during 2014. With superb game engines such as Unity and Unreal Engine removing entry barriers, the mobile gaming market is, on the surface, an easy space to get into. So how can you make sure your game is a hit? Well, your title has a much higher chance of success if its performance and efficiency matches those of top-tier games. Development for mobile has some serious differences to that of PC and console. State of the art mobile devices have a theoretical maximum bandwidth of just eight to 12GB/s and a power supply limited to three to 7W (on high-end smartphones and tablets) with which they need to run the entire system-on- chip (SoC). As a comparison, the latest releases of consoles have somewhere between 80 to 100W of power to play with – and some PCs require over 300W for the GPU alone. Despite this constraint, it is not impossible to achieve the label of console quality in mobile graphics. Games such as Asphalt 8 and Need for Speed: Most Wanted look superbly good and do not overheat or drain the device straight away. All that is required is a slightly different way of thinking.
ARMED AND READY ARM can help developers understand this way of thinking. A key player in the mobile
industry since 1997, ARM landed its first mobile design win with the Nokia 6110. Today, over 50bn ARM chips have shipped and our CPUs are in over 95 per cent of all mobile phones. More recently, ARM launched its range of ARM Mali GPUs, of which the Mali-400 GPU continues to hold the title of the highest shipping GPU model in the world today.
It is not impossible to achieve ‘console
quality’ mobile graphics – it just requires a different approach.
ARM engineers understand mobile phone technology inside out and their detailed knowledge of processor design can help developers get to the root of a whole host of application performance issues. Over the years, ARM has established a strong, global developer ecosystem, which comprises not just of the large game studios and publishers, but also small, independent developers. Working with societies such as TIGA or
Games Eden, the network for the computer games industry in the East of England, where over 18 per cent of the UK’s games industry workforce is based, has helped share ARM’s knowledge of mobile development within the local area. Partnerships like these ensure the tech cluster around the ARM HQ in Cambridge continues to flourish and expand
12 | JUNE 2014
the mobile gaming experience for the rest of the world. So for those of you interested in mobile gaming, where can you go to get more information on how to develop for mobile? When using a game engine such as Unity
or Unreal Engine, there will always be extra frames per second gained by using tools such as ARM DS-5 Streamline and the Mali Graphics Debugger.
If you are building a mobile game from scratch for the first time, the OpenGL ES SDK for Android will take you step by step through the process from creating your first Android Native Application to working with advanced ASTC textures.
For an experienced developer, the Mali
Developer Center has a host of deep-dive guides that cover issues such as texture compression, batching and overdraw as well as sample codes that demonstrate how to create cool effects efficiently.
Information on all of these can be found
at
malideveloper.arm.com. If you have any questions, get in touch with the ARM Developer Relations team via the ARM Connected Community.
If you are around Cambridge in July, head
to the Brains Eden Gaming Festival being held at Anglia Ruskin University where we will be helping young developers make games for mobile devices.
ARM is sponsoring Brains Eden, which will be held in Cambridge from July 4th to 7th.
www.brainseden.net
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