CAPTIONING UNDER WAY
Hi everyone.
So here we are with a look at Apple's
big announcement. They announced Metal at their WWDC conference.
Now what this basically is, is a way for games developers
to reach the lower level of hardware
without as much Open GL sitting in the way. Now the reason this is kind of
important
is because Apple has kind of stolen a march on Google here in the Android
operating system.
Apple have taken technology concepts which we're
becoming very familiar with in the traditional gaming space with,
for instance, AMD's Mantle technology and Microsoft's push to DirectX 12
which will also provide what we call their Metal access
to the GPU technology. That's the bits that basically makes graphics work
on a mobile device, games console or a PC.
Now the reason Apple are doing this
is quite simple. Open GL is a bit of a bloated mess.
It's been known as a bloated mess for a very very long time. DirectX is also a
bloated mess.
Now the idea here really is to get away from having an abstraction layer, a
big thick, chunky abstraction layer getting in the way
that basically means that every time a developer wants to do something on the
GPU
it first has to go through decades' worth of cruft
to get its instruction to the GPU, get a response back and do the processing on
screen.
Now with Metal, games developers are able to basically send their information
directly to the GPU
program directly on the GPU and have that information returned to the screen
and that is allowing for some truly stunning
results. I am NOT joking when I say this is a watershed moment in mobile gaming.
Now the reason we're talking about this here is because, well,
how will people respond? More importantly
CAN Google respond with a fragmented ecosystem the way they do?
The reason the likes of AMD, Microsoft and Apple
are able to go for this bare Metal access is because
they control their ecosystems to a certain extent.
AMD for instance makes the Radeon
style of graphics cards, popularised by ATI before they bought them.
They control the hardware, they control the drivers and they control to a certain
extent
the Open GL DirectX that is operated on those cards.
By providing a third path, a path that doesn't have either Open GL
or Direct 3D available that gives direct bare Metal access
AMD can effectively tell developers, hey, if you do it like this,
you will get this massive performance boost. We've seen it
before in other games, it's worth a minimum 30% in some cases -
a 30% performance boost over
other techniques. That's a watershed moment guys.
Now, here's our problem. Where everybody else is able to control
the chip designs, the software layer
and to a certain extent the way games developers are going to access
those resources, for Google they're kind of in a bit of a strange space.
Yes they control the software implementation, but they have zero control
over the hardware implementation and
that's where this kind of technique, this direct
bare Metal access technique can really come into its own
because we have the likes of Samsung, Qualcomm and a multitude of
other processor design companies building ARM chips
creating their designs based on ARM's reference, the same way that
Apple does. We find ourselves in a strange situation where
Google essentially has to get all of these hardware manufacturers
to agree to a single principle,
a single way to access those reference designs
in hardware. I can't see that is going to happen
anytime soon in my opinion. Mostly because the fragmented nature
of Android but also because, well, can you imagine trying to get
four or five chip companies to all agree on a single way to handle GPU?
It isn't going to happen. There's too much infighting
within the Android ecosystem to ever see that happen.
What I think we'll find is Google will partner up with the likes of Samsung,
likes of Qualcomm, to produce a single reference design
for GPU, probably based on Krait or
its next cousin as it were. Now
if Google isn't able to make that happen,
what I'm afraid we're going to see is really a two-tier
gaming within the mobile space. You will have what Apple can do
and what Google can do, and Google, I'm afraid, the Android ecosystem
would be potentially 30-40%
behind what Apple can do. Now we're not talking about raw frame rates here, what
we're really talking about is
graphical fidelity. The number of polygons you can push around a screen
the texture quality, the level of textures
things like depth of field, bloom and everything like that.
Essentially Apple is able to get very close to recreating
console gaming graphics on their mobile paths.
Google on the other hand may find itself unfortunately playing second fiddle
for a fair while to come. We're going to have to wait and see what happens
at Google IO 2014. I do expect there to be some movement
on graphics aspect but I don't believe we'll see
Google move to a bare Metal process.