Performance and Optimization Tutorials

In the last 7 years there has been a massive 300x increase in GPU performance and 24x increase in screen resolution, making AAA graphics content achievable on mobile games. This talk will provide a case study of the Afterpulse game to cover the key developer features of the mobile architecture as well as the best coding practices used to achieve AAA graphics content. The session will also cover the most useful developer tools used to detect specific code bottlenecks, and how they were overcome.

This presentation introduces you to the Arm tools and skills needed to profile and debug your application, and the optimization techniques and best practices to achieve high frame rates with high quality 3D graphics on mobile platforms.

The session also uses practical case studies to illustrate how the application bottlenecks were detected and the optimizations implemented to overcome the challenges.

A review of the best practises and recommended techniques to overcome the most common problems faced when developing under the unique challenges of mobile platforms. A number of techniques to optimize CPU load as batching, culling, LOD and sorting are reviewed. Best practices to balance the load on vertex and fragment shader are examined. The main factors influencing bandwidth load are also discussed.

How to implement reflections, refractions and a completely new technique for rendering real-time shadows based on the use of the local cubemap technique.

This presentation shows how the concept of standard cubemaps has evolved to a more complex concept of local cubemaps used to implement local reflections, shadows and refractions. It will demonstrate why rendering techniques based on local cubemaps are important for mobile graphics as they are faster, more efficient and provide better quality than other classical rendering techniques such as shadow mapping and runtime planar reflections using a mirrored camera. The limitations of rendering techniques based on local cubemaps, and how to address them.

Many developers in the mobile space started out in the desktop or console space and are re-creating their work in those spaces for mobile. Some of them find that they have to drop the complexity of their content in order to achieve reasonable performance on mobile, but this needn’t necessarily be the case. Desktop and mobile GPUs work in different ways and have different capabilities; understanding these differences can inform a more efficient usage of the resources available on mobile GPUs.

An overview of effective batching techniques for mobile graphics development, combined with an examination of how Arm has generated dynamic animated geometry from static vertex buffers in demos through the years, generating complex and elegant motion from little more than a couple of floating point values.

An explanation of why texture compression is important, before moving onto the feature set and image quality of ASTC.

The advantages of ASTC compared to other texture formats, as well as the best practises of using ASTC and ASTC Full Profile.

This “Getting the Best out of ASTC” white paper is a user guide for graphics developers to know how ASTC works, and most importantly, it describes all the different configuration options and gives examples on the improvements a developer can get by tailoring the configuration. This tutorial was included in the GPU Pro 5 publication

Whether you’re an artist using the desktop tools or a programmer integrating the command line compressor into your asset pipeline, this guide to making effective use of the new Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression method, with a focus on selecting the right quality settings and metrics for your artwork, will be useful for you.

A look at  particle simulations, physics simulations, and what makes ASTC special.

Arm will first introduce you to methodologies for the efficient rendering of high quality 3D graphics in mobile games, and Gameloft will take you behind the curtain on optimization examples used on their game titles, detailing how they identified the bottlenecks and implemented the optimizations.

A look at how GameBench software can help developers optimize game performance before launch.

Performance is important for smooth gameplay and a good gaming experience. This presentation explores good programming practices and OpenGL tricks that may allow you to increase your game’s fps and get more out of your devices.