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ARM Sees Mobile As the Future Gaming Platform of Choice
Stoobalou writes with an interview in Thinq with a few folks from ARM on their plans for the future of embedded graphics. From the article:
"'If you're looking at the visual experience that we can deliver on a mobile, in terms of the capabilities of the devices that are on the market today, increasingly it is visually outstanding — but we need to do more maths, because we have an increasing screen resolution and we have increasing content complexity, and we have to do it all in pretty low power. So, if we look at where we were a few years ago, if you take the benchmarks of a VGA display and typical low-res content — all of a sudden, by the time you get to a 4K screen and some of the complexity of tesselated stuff you see in DX11 today, you're talking about a 500x increase in performance.' ... 'We're still maintaining that 1W power envelope within your mobile device, yet being expected to deliver 500 times the performance,' Hickman added. That's a major undertaking, but one which the next generation of Mali processors will work towards.'
All of the graphics development in the embedded world is nice, but it is disheartening to see the lack of source code for all of the new mobile GPUs.
God bless all the people out their playing games on their phones and iPads. More power to them. But if the implication is that console and PC gamers are going to give up their platforms of choice for the under-powered processors and AWFUL controls of your typical mobile device, then you need to lay off the crack. An iPad may be a great plaform for a quick, fun game of Angry Birds; but that is completely apples and oranges compared to playing Fallout New Vegas or Mass Effect 2 on my Xbox. And I can only imagine how the die-hard PC gamers would react, considering how much they bitch about even console controllers. Just try moving around a 3D environment with an inaccurate touch screen that responds maybe 3/4 of the time and gets smeared up from your greasy cheeto fingers. It's an exercise in "Just how pissed off can I get before I decide to chunk this expensive iPad across the fucking room?"
This whole thing reminds me of the "Motion controls are going to be THE controller of the future" hype from a few years back. I've got a Wii sitting in my closet that'll attest to the fact that the motion control thing gets old very fast.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Dear Arm,
When you can get me a cellphone with a 4Kx4K screen, never mind one the size of a twin bed, then I'll think you have a clue about this "future of gaming is mobile" nonsense.
Until then, keep respawning, n00b.
Perhaps "normal" computers will exist as locked-down platforms while only programmers and hobbyists will have what we know as computers today.
That's what I'm afraid of. There are two uses of a computer: viewing works of authorship and creating them. Video game consoles and iPad-style tablets are good for viewing works, not for creating them, and this is primarily due to manufacturer fiat enforced through mandatory verification of digital signatures. If the majority of personal computing moves to locked-down platforms, we risk it becoming cost-prohibitive to make the leap from consuming to creating.
Hopefully computer parts will still be available in the future for the DIY crowd after the demand for the typical desktop PC finally dries up.
Sure, they'll be available. Otherwise, nobody will have the capacity to create works to play on these locked-down devices. But we're heading toward having to pay upwards $3,000, have a Dun & Bradstreet D-U-N-S number for your own company, and have professional programming work on your resume just to obtain a license in your own name to install a compiler on a computer that you ow^H^H perpetually lease.
However, I have found some really fun games on my nexus s and some of the games even have as good or better graphics than my psp.
But the PSP still has much better buttons than any phone that's not also made by Sony. I tried some games on an Android-powered phone, and the on-screen gamepad made it difficult for me to figure out where my thumbs were while I was looking at the action between them. So there'll have to be some sort of handheld dock with buttons on it.
Because Emacs is one big copyright infringement
Only the FSF can sue, and they are unlikely to do so for a mistake they themselves are responsible for.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Console manufacturers see consoles as future gaming platform of choice.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I have a couple of issues with that statement...
1) There are inherent benefits from playing on a larger screen. For example, gaming on a 73-in. diagonal screen allows you to absorb detail a whole lot better. Movement is captured easier using peripheral vision and you can focus on the important parts of the image allowing deeper focus instead of trying to process all the information on the screen.
2) The resolution of gaming devices is nowhere near where they should be. Again, you would need a larger screen to take advantage of that.
3) Latency over the current infrastructure is nowhere near where it would need to be for real-time precision gaming.
"If you look over the last 15 years, we've gone from really noddy 2D games like the stuff you used to see on your telly back when I was a kid playing Pong on these little Atari machines, and now you can take a platform like the Galaxy S II and you can play some really complicated mobile games on it," enthused Ian Smythe, the director of marketing for ARM's Media Processing Division and the man tasked with getting Mali into the hands of the company's licensees.
That's funny, I could have sworn 15 years ago we were playing Super Mario 64 and Battle Arena Toshinden 2, with Final Fantasy VII, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night all announced as coming out the next year.
Anyway, the important thing that this article wants to ignore is that Intel, AMD, nVidia, and IBM are not going to stand still while ARM improves.
They can compare ARM systems to consoles all they want. Like it or not, the current game consoles are all using hardware designs that are nearing a decade old now. The rumors about the Wii U's specs aren't helping, as the rumors so far only peg it as being equal in performance to the Xbox 360 and PS3.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
for clarification (as so many people misunderstand this): yes there are linux kernel drivers: these are "shims" which provide userspace access to the memory area of the 3D graphics engine. yes there are X11 drivers: these use the standard /usr/lib/libGLES.so.2 libraries... which are proprietary.
it is these OpenGL libraries (libGLES.so.2) for which the source code is NOT available. it is these OpenGL libraries that have all the coding to understand the actual 3D hardware. and, it is the 3D hardware itself which these SoC embedded vendors are NOT providing any information about.
now, in the case of x86 hardware, you have a choice: it's possible to just plug in a different video card. but with these embedded SoC systems, it's not like you can get a laser to cut the silicon out of the chip and replace it with something else. it's an all-or-nothing deal, and that's what's pissing people off in the Free Software Community.
and as you can see from the nouveau and gallium3d projects, it's taken absolutely years to do the required reverse-engineering of NVidia's GPU engines and so on. AMD (ATI) are finally getting with the picture and releasing information. even intel are beginning to understand that maintaining a proprietary 3D Graphics Library is to bring yourself absolute hell on earth.
it would be infinitely better for all parties involved in the production of 3D Graphics Hardware - embedded and otherwise - to make the specifications of their hardware publicly available, such that the Free Software Community could help with the incredibly complex job of writing OpenGL (and other standard) Libraries once and only once (gallium3d).
Of course they are optimistic about their target market. Why else would they be in business? If we broaden our definition of games beyond Crysis, CoD, and WoW, they could be right. After all a lot of people are perfectly happy playing cheap games like Angry Birds.
Yeah, that's not a retarded slippery slope argument based on a dark fantasy of some "consumption-only" world that doesn't actually exist - and that no one is even trying to bring about. Not at all retarded. Not at all.
Gamers VS Casual Games...
You could argue that Facebook is the Gaming Platform of choice...
I would say that it is set to become the Mobile Gaming Platform of choice...
Games cost 1$ so ya, you get more of them playing and bought over 70$ titles for a console or PC...
Yeah, that's not a retarded slippery slope argument based on a dark fantasy of some "consumption-only" world that doesn't actually exist
In the video gaming market, it has existed for over two decades. There are four platforms for playing video games on a television: Wii, Xbox 360, PLAYSTATION 3, and a home theater PC. Of the four, only the home theater PC is not consumption-only. But almost nobody makes video games with a mode for the home theater PC because almost nobody has one because almost nobody makes games for them.
Grandparent probably meant 11 microns, or millionths of a meter. The symbol for a micron is Greek mu + Latin m, but Slashdot strips out Greek due to several different types of vandalism that were common several years ago.
If you look over the last 15 years, we've gone from really noddy 2D games
You mean like this 2D game starring Noddy that runs on an ARM based handheld?
Let's see.... what possible gaming platform does ARM produce CPUs for..?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
For hardcore gamers, the PC is the platform of choice. There's just no way consoles cut it for hardcore gamers. Yet, console games outsell PC games something like 7 or 8 to 1 these days, because people wanting a more casual experience outnumber the really hardcore gamers by about that much.
The same thing will happen with mobile games and consoles. Consoles will still exist of course - they're not going anywhere - but the money and the market will naturally shift to mobile. The number of people that want a quick game of Angry Birds on the bus trip vastly outnumbers the number who want to play console style games.
It'll be a pyramid, with the niche but hardcore gamer PC on top, the middle of the road gamers on consoles, and the huge masses of people playing $1 games on phones.
whatever happened to the super cheap runs on air and Linux netbooks? Those things were supposed to take the netbook market by storm and save us form global warming. Where are they now?
That, that really grinds my gears!
And yet we're talking about graphic performance and beautiness, and not about gameplay.
Same old, same old.
Mastering the English language is fucking easy: all you have to do is to put an f* word in every fucking sentence.
I'm still thinking LEG is the way to go...
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Facebook gaming has become really significant, not only as a gaming environment but as a way to keep Facebook users around, as opposed to burning out and moving on to the next social networking platform that comes around.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
so when can I start to play nethack ( http://www.nethack.org/ ) on an arm phone? ;)
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
You know the maths you've been doing? Well do more of them! Near as I reckon, that's the only way to figuring out if we can run them games!
Smartphones already deliver better graphics than any of the 1980s PCs and most from the 90s, and more CPU horsepower. The important part is creating games that have enough content depth to make them engaging, as opposed to just thumb candy (though there's also a market for selling high volumes of $1 thumb candy games.)
MYST would fit on a typical smartphone screen. Porting Nethack has probably already been done (:-), though it's probably better on a phone with a separate keypad. Some games need bigger screens to create a sense of immersion, but many don't. (Would Doom have worked on a phone?)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The important folks that will be making the choice are the developers. Engineering time and money resources are finite, even for the biggest companies. When it comes time to choose between developing a game for a mobile phone vs. a game for a console, there will come a time -- not too far from now -- when the choice will be the phone.
ARM wants their products to be the One True Way(tm) so they see everything they are in as the future. Doesn't make it so.
It is also silly because small, mobile, devices will never be as nice as larger devices for some things. There is something to be said for sacking out on the couch to watch TV or play games, or to sit at a desk and use a full keyboard and large screen to send an e-mail or write a document.
You find that by and large newer gadgets don't replace older ones. That is true in the computer world for sure. There are actually more mainframes around now than when they were all you could get. There are just even more other kinds of computers. Same deal with laptops and desktops. Laptops are extremely popular, but they haven't taken away the desktop market. Yet again, smartphones are extremely popular, but they haven't taken away the laptop market. People aren't ditching their laptops for smartphones, they have both.
Heck same deal in the kitchen. I have no less than 6 devices, all of which have the primary purpose of heating food and drink: a stove/oven, a microwave, a toaster, a crock pot, a bread machine, and an electric kettle. None of them is a replacement for any other. I am not going to throw away my stove because I have a microwave. They are for different uses, despite all being the same general class of tool.
Likewise I have a desktop, laptop, and smartphone. None of them are in line to replace any others. I like them all, they all have different uses.
So while I'm sure mobile gaming will continue to be popular, I do not see it taking over as the only kind of gaming. I have games on my phone and they are great for when I'm waiting in the doctor's office or something but I've no desire to toss out my PC games.
Mobile chip maker ARM sees mobile devices as the future of gaming! News at eleven. I'll stick with my PC for serious gaming, thanks.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
Why are hardware companies keeping their hardware API's still secret? There is such an investment in silicon these days that any hardware engineer and hence any company their work for to reverse engineer the API of competing hardware in less than two months. But does knowing the API really amount to much? The big companies are desoldering board components and reverse engineering firmware. The only people hurt by keeping hardware API's a secret is the people implementing open source drivers free for that companies product. And that is only useful if they are trying to obsolete their products every few years and or control how it's used.
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