This is a guest blog by Trina Watt, Vice President of Solutions Marketing for ARM Mali GPUs. The views expressed in this blog are hers alone. We invited Trina to share some of her thoughts on the emergence and prominence of the graphics processing unit (GPU) for mobile devices.
Content is king
10 years ago, no one predicted the current explosion in mobile devices. The concept of replacing your laptop with a non-PC mobile device was unthinkable. Yet last year, we saw such huge diversification in the range of mobile devices available across the globe as more than a billion smartphones shipped. Now I regularly see people walking around with not only two phones - work and personal - but also an additional tablet to consume and create content on a bigger screen, as well as for sharing content.
Consumers have embraced the idea of running different content on different mobile devices at different times of day. Content is indeed the king when it comes to the mobile experience, and enabling mobile devices to get the most out of the content available could be an issue with a limited power supply. But there are a few key elements that are contributing to making your mobile device the vital part of everyday life that it now is. Good network coverage is, of course, one of them, but as a graphics person, that isn’t really what gets me out of bed in the morning. It is the visual aspects of what has been made possible and what will be possible in the next few years that really interests me.
The rise and rise of mobile graphics
The inclusion of graphics processing units (GPUs) in mobile devices has gone from a nice-to-have to a prerequisite even in the $50 smartphone market space, and this has massively increased the ability of mobile devices to deliver visually stunning graphics experiences. So which features does the GPU play a part in today and what should we expect it to bring to the table in a few years?
When you initially turn on a mobile device you are greeted with the user interface (UI). Different devices apply layers on top of the standard Android™ UI to personalise the experience of that device. GPUs generate the smoothness of the movement in that UI – if it has a buttery-smooth movement then your GPU is doing what it does best. Then you decide to browse the web. When you’re just simply reading text you wouldn’t think that your GPU would be doing much and, true, in some devices, it is the CPU that carries the main workload.
One of the challenges for smaller-screen devices is making the browsing experience as good as possible no matter what your screen size is. With this in mind, we are starting to see GPUs being used more to aid the zooming motions for text. Currently, as you zoom in the GPU will not render back out to the screen – it will only render out when the final zoom choice has been made. By making more use of the GPU, you are able to see the clarity of the text throughout the zooming process.
One of the main uses of mobile devices from an apps perspective is gaming. Around 80 per cent of the apps purchased for both Android and iOS are games. Mobile gaming can be anything from basic, addictive games, such as Flappy Bird, to immersive games with significantly richer user experience and higher-quality graphics, such as The Room. The Room is the first game I have seen which mentions a minimum graphics requirement in a similar approach to what PC games have already been doing for many years.
Games demand performance
Gaming titles continue to be the main driver pushing the upper limits of the graphics requirements in mobile, and we don’t see this changing in the near future. Mobile gaming is now looking at what is visually possible in console gaming and working out how it can be transitioned into the mobile space. Lighting is a key element in the realism in gaming. Geomerics, a company recently acquired by ARM, develops global illumination for the gaming and entertainment industries and is now focusing on getting advanced lighting effects to a wider range of platforms, including mobile devices. This software solution delivers an energy-efficient solution for bringing console-quality visuals to mobile devices.
But what should really excite people are the new things which their mobile devices are enabling them to do. Cameras are now a de facto standard in a smartphone – yes, you do have a variety of quality levels, but people are still capturing and sharing more and more of their lives via mobile devices. Nothing new here. The new thing is that consumers with lower-quality cameras don’t have to put up with grainy images, poor lighting, etc. They can clean up their photos and post them quickly without having to wait until they have time to access their PC.
Some GPUs can be used not only to process pixels and put them out onto a screen but also to process large numbers of pixels coming in from cameras. This functionality, when the mathematical architecture of a GPU is put to use in handling computational activities, is known as GPU Compute. It helps you to not only produce superior photos, but also opens up new ways of interacting with the device. For example, it enables a mobile device to use face detection to unlock itself, or even limit the accessibility of content - good for people with small children.
The ever-growing needs of video
One other trend that continues to progress quickly is the consumption of video on mobile devices. The improvements in the networks have enabled a range of video-on-demand services. However, the bandwidth requirements to stream video to a mobile device have, in the past, been a huge limiting factor in this area. Several video codec standards are now gaining traction which will bring high-quality, compressed video to smartphones, balancing the bandwidth requirements of the device with the quality demands of the consumer. Two examples of these are HEVC (H.265) and VP9 which will be gradually adopted as more content uses them. Looking back at near history, this can often take several years to reach critical mass of available content. The GPU Compute functionality found in the ARM® Mali™-T600 and ARM Mali-T700 series of products enables these video codecs to hit the market sooner than a hardware-based-only solution would allow.
Advances in GPU technology and GPU Compute functionality will open up a huge range of opportunities for innovation in the coming years and will only help to make mobile devices an even-more essential part of our day-to-day lives. By increasing the computational horsepower of your smartphones at the same time as making them more power-efficient, not only will the visual experience of the top games and user interfaces continue to improve, but new functionalities will emerge similar to the computational photography and video-playback solutions currently being implemented.
With all of this to look forward to, who wouldn’t want a GPU in their mobile device?
