ARM Community: Mali GPUs at GDC 2013 - ARM Community

The Game Developers Conference is now a week away and dawning bright and clear on ARM's horizon. The largest and most professional event in the games industry calendar, this conference gets bigger and better year on year and 2013 is set to be no different, especially for ARM and its partners. By providing a comprehensive forum for gaming developers to showcase the industry's most recent and relevant tools, platforms and services the event propels innovation within the industry and defines the future of gaming.

Where else would the ARM Multimedia Team rather be?

"The Future of Mobile Gaming", an ARM-sponsored panel discussion, will undoubtedly be one of the highlights of the show. Featuring Baudouin Corman (VP Publishing Americas, Gameloft), David Helgason (CEO, Unity), Dr Chris Doran (Founder & COO, Geomerics), Niccolo De Masi (CEO, Glu), Jasper Smith (CEO, PlayJam) and Nizar Romdhane (Director of Ecosystem, ARM), this hour-long, audience-participative debate will place technology in the context of design and business, covering critical questions such as how the rapid increase in popularity of mobile devices will impact the games community, what potential games studios have to bring to these growing markets and how technology is shaping the future of mobile devices and gaming. Take a step back during the conference. Bring questions. See the gaming industry within the bigger picture and from the experts' perspective.

On top of this key debate ARM is pleased to host four further main conference sessions within the Programming track which will cover a broad array of topics, including:

• How ARM's integration of CPU and GPU technology brings benefits to game developers in the post-PC era (Wednesday, 5pm)
• Popular techniques for bringing console-like quality to mobile devices (Thursday, 10am)
• Design considerations to accelerate your applications on Android and Linux on mobile devices, optimizing battery life, memory constraints, frames per second and more (Wednesday 3:30pm)
• The new OpenGL ES 3.0 specification which is included on the latest Mali devices and incrementally adds new visual features to applications (Wednesday, 9:30am)

See our schedule here for more details.

And we are also currently finalizing preparations for what is looking to be a very exciting ARM booth for ARM Mali GPU fans. Partners such as EpicGames, Havok, Geomerics, Softkinetic, Metaio, Marmalade and PlayJam are giving talks in ARM’s Lecture Theatre from Wednesday to Friday, as well as showcasing their games, middleware, games engines and PlayJam’s Gamestick mobile console device within our booth.

ARM engineers will also be giving a series of talks in the Lecture Theatre. Key topics of focus will be ARM’s latest developer resources, the revolutionary ARM ASTC texture compression, an in-depth look at batching techniques, how ARM generates our own demos, how to generate complex and elegant motion from little more than a couple of floating point values, Open CL and Open GL ES 3.0 graphics. Open GL ES 3.0 will be an especially interesting subject as it is bringing improved features to the disposal of mobile game developers such as enhanced texturing support, high quality ETC2/EAC texture compression, full support for integer and 32-bit floating point operations in shaders, occlusion queries, transform feedback and support for multiple render targets - all features which vastly improve the visual experience of content compared to Open GL ES 2.0.

Please download the full schedule of the Lecture Theatre talks here.

For further details on GDC 2013, visit the Mali Developers Site or the official website. If you are unable to make any part of the event the ARM Multimedia Team will be regularly posting the latest happenings on our twitter page as well as updating ARMFlix with clips of interviews and demonstrations.


Gemma Paris, Developer Community Manager at ARM. After a successful career in location services and connectivity solutions for mobile phones, Gemma finally realised that the key to success for any mobile application is a good graphical interface, and hence joined ARM’s Multimedia Division team, where she carries out developer education activities for ARM’s Mali graphics architecture.