How Arm is Transforming Mobile Gaming Experiences 

Mobile gaming is continually being reshaped. With significant advances in content creation, enhanced realism, and immersive experiences, the way games are developed and experienced on mobile devices is evolving at a rapid pace. Game development has traditionally centered around content being primarily for PC and console consumption.  

However, this is changing. The global mobile gaming market is expected to account for 2.4 billion users by 2029. More people are now playing games on mobile devices than on any other platform, which in turn is driving demand for high performance alongside power efficiency.  

As technologies continue to advance, techniques once reserved for powerful PCs, like ray tracing, are becoming a reality on mobile GPUs, making high-quality mobile games more accessible than ever.  

Delivering compelling gaming experiences on mobile devices comes with its own set of challenges. Higher resolutions, greater frame rates, and more complex content demand greater GPU performance and efficiency, with this needing to be delivered on mobile devices that are constrained by cost, thermal limits, data bandwidth, and application size.  

Enabling immersive realism with Arm 

The latest Arm GPUs are engineered to ensure that mobile devices can handle the compute demands of high-quality gaming experiences while staying cool and preserving longer battery life. By optimizing GPU efficiency, Arm ensures that complex and realistic scenes are rendered without compromising performance. Techniques like super-resolution and frame interpolation can help achieve detailed and convincing scenes while maintaining power efficiency. 

Ray tracing is one technique that enhances visual realism by simulating the way light interacts with objects, producing high-quality shadows, mirror reflections, and ambient occlusions.  Since its introduction in the Arm Immortalis-G715 GPU, ray tracing has become more prevalent across mobile devices, with the latest Arm Immortalis-G925 GPU offering ray tracing performance improvements over the previous generation while maintaining the same level of accuracy in the transparency of gaming scenes.  

At Mobile World Congress (MWC), Arm showcased the ray tracing capabilities of the Immortalis GPUs with a playable version of our gaming demo Mori on the vivo X200 Series flagship smartphones, which are built on the MediaTek Dimensity 9400 systems-on-chip (SoC) featuring the Immortalis-G925.

Enhancing visual quality with Arm Accuracy Super Resolution

Arm Accuracy Super Resolution (Arm ASR) is an advanced upscaling technology designed to enhance the visual quality of mobile games while optimizing performance and power consumption. This open-source solution allows developers to render some stages of a frame at a lower resolution and then upscale it to a higher resolution, significantly improving GPU performance and leading to longer-lasting gaming experiences without compromising visual quality. 

At the Arm Game Developer Conference (GDC) developer summit and MWC, we showcased the performance benefits of Arm ASR in action through our Mori demo.  

How AI and ML can improve mobile gaming

Utilizing AI and machine learning (ML) techniques during the game development process is already enabling developers to speed up content creation, deliver greater realism, and enhance gameplay while optimizing GPU performance and efficiency. 

Enhanced AI gameplay

AI in mobile gaming is transforming the overall gameplay experience by enabling autonomous behavior and natural interactions. ML is generating more intelligent AI-based opponents, making the game more challenging and engaging for players.  

Multiple ML agents can guide realistic character behavior, while large language models facilitate natural conversations with in-game characters. Smaller language models, or “Tiny Stories”, are also being used to create more interactive and engaging narratives. At the Arm GDC Developer summit, we highlighted these verbal interactions with AI-powered Non-Player Characters (NPCs) on mobile. 

In the future, the potential of AI and ML in gaming and graphics is huge. These future possibilities could cover new scene representations, or entirely new AI and ML-generated images and videos.  

Benefits of AI and ML during game development 

AI optimizes mobile game performance by adjusting graphics, physics, and other elements based on device specifications. For example, PUBG Mobile scales graphics settings to maintain stable framerates, reducing resolution and effects on lower-end devices, while enabling advanced features on high-end ones. This ensures a consistent gaming experience across platforms.  

Digital content creation tools, middleware, and game engines are also increasingly leveraging AI and ML techniques to enhance productivity during the game development process. Here are a few  examples:  

• Enhanced automation: AI automates repetitive tasks, such as rigging animated figures, speeding up development, and ensuring consistency. 

• 3D modelling and video production: AI tools can generate detailed models from sketches, or automate video editing tasks, making the process faster and more efficient. 

• Writing code: AI tools generate code snippets from natural language descriptions, which accelerates game development and potentially reduces errors. 

• Middleware and game engines: AI optimizes performance in game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine, improving real-time rendering and physics simulations for a consistent gaming experience across various hardware configurations. 

Delivering more immersive, intelligent AI-powered mobile devices

Arm is committed to enabling the mobile gaming ecosystem by meeting developers where they are and helping them achieve their game development goals. We are preparing developers for the future of mobile gaming by providing leading-edge GPU technologies and solutions for mobile, alongside extensive tools and knowledge – including training and education on AI and ML techniques – that they need to create innovative gaming experiences. By working closely with developers, we are ensuring that they can leverage the full potential of Arm technologies as part of the ongoing mobile gaming transformation. 

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AI and ML are delivering improved mobile graphics, more intelligent interactions, and more immersive gaming experiences. Learn more below.