Hi and welcome to the Arm "What is" program series. In each episode, we dive into a tech topic
to give you insight and perspective into some of today's hottest design trends. I'm Brian Fuller,
editor-in-chief at Arm and today we're going to find out, what is high-fidelity mobile gaming?
And to help us with that, I want to introduce Steve Winburn, who is head of the developer
relations, advocacy and graphics engineering team for the client line of business at Arm.
Steve has been working in the game and graphics industry for more than 20 years at various game
publishers and hardware developers. And his go-to game, Assassin's creed. He actually worked on it
early in his career. So let's dive in. So Steve, what exactly is high-fidelity mobile gaming?
Well, high-fidelity gaming is when you refer to a feature of advanced graphics or complex
mechanics in game play. Basically when you think about high-fidelity gaming, to classify in that
category, a game needs to have some advanced 3D graphics. It's probably going to have high vertex
counts. It's going to have complex vertex and frequent traders, as well as, a sophisticated game play,
possibly including several AI controlled characters and a lot of demand on the GPU.
Now are high-fidelity games associated
only with mobile devices or do they run on laptops and game consoles as well?
No, no. High-fidelity gaming is not just limited to the mobile space. High-fidelity games are a
lot of times that people think first-person shooters, but it's not really, you know,
that just genre. You'll find them in racing games, you'll find them in online battle arenas,
and all types of the multiplayer online MMO games so they are spread across consoles and PC.
Talk a little bit more about the underlying technologies that enable high-fidelity gaming.
So the under, as I mentioned previously, some of the underlying technologies,
a lot of the 3D and advanced 3D graphics affects you would think about a lot of high vertex counts.
A lot of complex vertex and fragment shaders that are being used
to develop your art. A lot of sophisticated gameplay with AI, a lot of stress on the GPU,
a lot of features that you see rolling down from the PC and console world that really kind of
underlie what brings out all of the high-fidelity gaming, especially in the mobile space.
So what challenges do developers of high-fidelity mobile games
face today and how how are technology providers responding?
So the challenges really being faced, I believe a lot of these developers are seeing
as just keeping up with the various mobile platforms as you can imagine,
there's a large amount of devices. The main way we are seeing technology providers try and help
is through tools and to provide optimizations on performance on these mobile devices.
Basically for these new graphic techniques, and develop our educational resources and
then just making sure that developers have a wide swath, like I said, of tools to grab
and be able to work with to kind of get the best performance out of their gate.
So Steve, how do you see high-fidelity mobile gaming evolving in the coming years?
I think we're going to see some really incredible stuff, right? I think we're going to see the rise
of 5G, as well as, you're going to see a lot of GPU's continue to become more powerful,
more robust. You're going to see more features, work their way down from PC and consoles. You'll
see things like realistic lighting. You'll see more complex geometry, better shading textures,
better particle effects. I think overall, you're going to really start to see the cool things like
a lot of film type graphic, quality graphics flow into this space.
Well, thanks so much Steve. I think you've inspired us to go out to
our local app store and download some high-fidelity mobile games.
Now check out all our other "What is" episodes here and be sure to subscribe to this channel
because we'll be adding more as the year progressed. Thanks for listening!