ARM Community: New Developer Resources for GDC 2013 - ARM Community

The time of the year is upon us where an army from the ARM graphics ecosystem team descend upon yet another GDC (Game Developers Conference). This year we have significantly upped our presence at the event and the emphasis has been placed on getting the right resources to the developers.

We have a number of main conference sessions and for the first time we will also be hosting key gaming partners along with our developer education team to run talks on the ARM booth (More info on booth and partner activity at GDC 2013).

Last year at SIGGRAPH we were first to get OpenGL ES 3.0 development tools in the hands of developers in the form of the OpenGL ES 3.0 Emulator, OpenGL ES 3.0 SDK and the Texture Compression Tool with support for ETC2. This year at GDC we have more exciting tools and resources that we will be announcing and releasing.

We start with a new version of the OpenGL ES 3.0 Emulator. The latest version brings support for Linux and ARM will also be the only company to have submitted for Khronos conformance for both Mali hardware and Emulator products. What does this mean? It will allow developers to produce content and applications targeting the new cutting edge Khronos API before more devices with Mali GPUs become available this year. Being Khronos conformant will mean that your development experience will be uncompromised and you will have the confidence that your code will be portable to real Mali GPU based devices.

ARM have been actively involved in steering the graphics industry with new and innovative technologies such as ASTC which will start to emerge later this year in devices containing the Mali-T628 and Mali-T678 GPUs. To support this, we have added support for ASTC texture compression to our existing Texture Compression Tool, enabling the content creators to compress textures to this new standard and easily configure the large array of different configuration options to get the best looking and smallest textures for the content in mind. The tool allows the content creator to visualize the compressed textures and view statistical information about the compression quality, easily allowing the user to tweak the settings to achieve the desired quality.



We will also be following up with an update to the OpenGL ES 3.0 Emulator in April with support for ASTC textures, allowing developers to visualize the compressed textures in the context of their application.

Last year we launched an update to DS-5 Streamline with support for Mali GPUs for combined CPU and Mali GPU performance analysis. This year, we will be demonstrating on our booth support for the latest generation of Mali GPUs running on devices such as the Google Nexus 10.



Lastly, we are previewing the latest addition to the Mali tools family – The Mali Graphics Debugger. This is a trace and debug tool for OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenGL ES 3.0 allowing developers to step through draw-call by draw-call at the API level to identify issues with their application that may have issues.

The Mali OpenGL ES 3.0 Emulator, Texture Compression tool with ASTC support and ARM DS-5 Streamline with support for Mali-400 and Mali-T600 series will be available from the Mali Developer Center from GDC 2013.

To learn more about these and many other developer resources, please visit ARM booth 1124 at GDC for a live demo.

Product is based on a published Khronos Specification, and is expected to pass the Khronos Conformance Testing Process when available. Current conformance status can be found at www.khronos.org/conformance.



Anand Patel, Developer Tools Product Manager, Media Processing Division, ARM, Anand joined the Media Processing Division at ARM two years ago, bringing eight years of experience in creating and delivering captivating demonstrations as part of the ARM Solutions Marketing team and Media Processing Division marketing team, focusing on delivering visually engaging demonstrations that showcase the capabilities of ARM® Mali Graphics Processors. He now is responsible for delivering world class development tools and resources for graphics developers.