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.

Comments

Dear Arm

[blair1q]

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.

Re:Dear Arm

[elrous0]

99 cent games that are crappy clones of mediocre arcade games from the early 90's will be all the rage

Nostalgia will only carry you so far. And I say that as someone who has been gaming since the Atari 2600 was the cutting-edge. Most people have fond memories of old games and may get a kick out of playing them again for a while (yeah, I got half-an-erection the first time I played "Defender" again on a modern console). But the nostalgia wears off fast. And at the end of the day, most gamers are going to come back to the modern games--no matter how much they try to convince themselves with that "Games used to be better back in MY day" crap. I've played in every era of gaming and games today are the best, period. All my fond memories of The Bards Tale and Pool of Radiance aren't going to make them better than Oblivion.

Re:Dear Arm

[CronoCloud]

Pool of Radiance? Predecessor? Uninstalled? It was a DOS game from 1989,ran from floppy, didn't have a predecessor.

Unless you're referring to this Pool of Radiance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pool_of_Radiance:_Ruins_of_Myth_Drannor

Multitouch gamepad drawback

[tepples]

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.

in other news

[Trepidity]

Console manufacturers see consoles as future gaming platform of choice.

Re:Whose choice?

[Skarecrow77]

There are few very good games on my droid / rooted nook that I quite enjoy. Robodefense. battleheart. game dev story. they're cheap, they're addictive, and they're fun.

They're not even close to the same thing as starcraft, mass effect, world of warcraft, modern warfare, etc.

They're almost different genres, and I think that's how we should see them. They're as different from one-another as holywood blockbuster movies are from semi-professional youtube videos. Why can't I go to the theater to watch Captain America and then come home and watch epic mealtime, and enjoy both on their own merits? why try and make one into the other?

Keep em separate. enjoy them both on their own merits. don't try and merge them.

15 years ago

[VGPowerlord]

"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.

lack of source code

[lkcl]

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).

Re:For over two decades

[The Dawn Of Time]

That's not "the world" friend. At best, it's a consumption-only province. Even considering that, there's no particular requirement that every product in every market meet your every need, and such a system never has and never will exist.

I know nerds can't bear the idea that there are people who would make different choices because OBVIOUSLY your choices are objectively superior, but hey! that's just how it is.

Re:Whose choice?

[smelch]

Do you think Blizzard will wake up one day and say "shit, all my money comes from mobile!" no, because they don't do that. Do you think EA might do that? Maybe, but do you know what they will cut? The shovelware. We won't lose the AAA titles, if anything they'll get better as the crap thins out.

Limited graphics require Better Content

[billstewart]

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?)