ARM Community: Immerse Yourself In TrueForce – Powered by Mali GPUs - ARM Community

3D has been the buzz word in graphics for the past year. What most people associate with 3D is hi-tech expensive equipment, be it a high-end television or games console owned only by the most advanced of gadget geeks.

At ARM we questioned why 3D should be limited to cinemas or the most powerful of high end gaming consoles? Along comes the ARM® Mali™-400 MP GPU - a very powerful graphics processor capable of some impressive feats but with energy-efficiency and portability at the heart of its design. Think 3D Stereoscopic gaming at HD resolutions but running on something that will fit into your pocket.
And that leads me on nicely to TrueForce - a demo created by ARM. Working with concept artist, Atle Maeland and graphics content specialists Allegorithmic, our graphics demo team in Trondheim, Norway was able to create something that is literally out-of-this-world.



TrueForce is a spaceship racing and precision game set in an asteroid belt in a distant galaxy. The goal is to race through the track as quickly as possible while collecting point tokens and power-ups, and avoiding crashing into megatons of space rock. The 6-axis control system gives full freedom to turn, pitch, roll and boost in any direction, making it an immersive playground for acrobatic daredevils. Stereoscopic 3D rendering gives an extra sense of depth, space and speed that change the way you play and experience the game.

The full shader programmability of the Mali-400 MP GPU allowed realistic looking effects like bump mapping, reflections and delicate lighting. In addition, the demo allowed the team to implement efficient rendering of large sets of objects with a dynamic level of detail. GPU programmability allows off-loading of computationally expensive, parallelizable tasks like animation, transform and lighting of large batches of objects from the CPU to the GPU. Such optimizations made it possible to render the scene twice per frame to achieve the stereo 3D effect at an impressive frame rate.

The stereoscopic effect was achieved by rendering the scene two times with two different camera matrices every frame. The left and right cameras were slightly offset to the sides to imitate two eyes watching through the screen plane, giving an immersive Stereoscopic 3D effect, which was appropriate for this game. Other techniques exist that can be used to produce a game that is more comfortable to view for extended periods of time – all of which can be implemented with current Mali drivers and programmable shaders.

The TrueForce game will be making its debut at the ARM Technical Conference 2010, taking place at the Santa Clara Convention Center from November 9-11, 2010. So please come on down, put on the 3D glasses, pick up the controller and immerse yourself in this amazing experience.



Anand Patel, Demo Solutions Manager, Media Processing Division, ARMjoined the Media Processing Division at ARM earlier this year, bringing six years of experience in creating captivating demonstrations as part of the ARM Solutions Marketing team. He now focuses on delivering visually engaging demonstrations that showcase the capabilities of ARM® Mali™ Graphics Processors.

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