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The Number One Educational Resource for the Game Industry

Session Name: Bringing AAA Graphics to Mobile Platforms
Speaker(s): Niklas Smedberg
Company Name(s): Epic Games
Track / Format: Programming

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Overview:

With the explosive progress of mobile hardware, it's now possible to use advanced AAA graphics techniques that were previously only used on gaming platforms such as Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. However, there are fundamental technical differences that should be considered in order to achieve suitable performance and quality on mobile hardware.

The tile-based GPU architecture common on mobile platforms means that you can do certain things very efficiently like blending, handling overdraw and anti-aliasing, but other graphics techniques have to be redesigned to avoid things like dependent texture reads, texture coordinate manipulation and render target usage. There are also other gotchas that have unexpected performance penalties, like using the Z and W components to pack more texture coordinates into interpolators.

The presentation will explain how a mobile tile-based GPU works in detail and how to modify and adapt the implementation of various graphics effects so that they become viable for this kind of GPU. Implementations from Infinity Blade 2 and Infinity Blade: Dungeons will be described, with examples such as god rays and material effects to demonstrate how to maximize the graphics potential of mobile platforms.

GDC Europe 2012

Niklas Smedberg

Epic Games

free content

Programming

Programming