GDC Presentation ReviewsDec 21

GDC 2015: “Enhancing Your Unity Mobile Games (Presented by ARM)” by Carl Callewaert of Unity Technologies, Roberto Lopez Mendez of ARM, Tony Prosser of Realtime UK, and Angelo Theodorou (@encelo?) of ARM https://gdcvault.com/play/1022408/Enhancing-Your-Unity-Mobile-Games

I thought this presentation was mostly useless.

The first presenter’s section was so high-level that I didn’t get anything from it. They covered topics like “mobile devices use batteries” and “when you optimize, focus on the performance bottleneck.”

1/6

Enhancing Your Unity Mobile Games (Presented by ARM)

The ARM Guide to Unity shows developers how to get the most out of Unity when developing under the unique challenges of mobile platforms.The talk offers a preview of the next release of the ARM Guide to Unity and highlights the most relevant...

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And “mobile devices don’t have as much bandwidth as desktop devices, so consider using texture compression.”

They did say one thing I thought was interesting: 4x MSAA is free on Mali GPUs. Perhaps they have some kind of lossless compression support that they use under the hood? Such support is quite common; I wish they could talk more about that.

The next presenter described adjusting reflection cubemaps so they align better, and then applying this principle to shadows.

2/6

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I’ve heard about this technique before, but I’ve never studied it, so I appreciated the explanation. They described that you actually use ray tracing to figure out where to sample the cube map. You use proxy geometry, and shoot a reflection ray from the point of reflection into the proxy geometry. Depending on where it hits, you sample a different location in the cube map.

(This explanation didn’t make sense to me, though: wouldn’t you need a BVH for the proxy geometry?)

3/6

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They then describe how to use this for shadows: you bake the cubemaps with transmittance values in the alpha channel. When you sample from it, the alpha channel tells you whether your pixel is lit or not. And for soft shadows, you can just sample a lower-res mipmap of the cube map. So that’s neat.

The next section was from a company that makes offline-rendered demo reels. And I was like “um, cool?” They made the assets for a real-time demo.

4/6

Dec 21 at 12:24amWeb
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They were like “our triangle budget for the whole scene was the same number of triangles we usually use in just a character’s fingernail” and my reaction was like “well what did you expect?” The worst part was that their company’s name is, no joke, “Realtime UK.”

The last section was a Unity guy showing off lighting in Unity, but it had nothing to do with ARM whatsoever. He was like “We use Enlighten! It updates as you move stuff around! So cool!” and I was like “why are you here”

5/6

Show threadGDC Presentation ReviewsDec 21
Review: 3/10 they get some points for the cubemap stuff, but that’s pretty much it
Show threadAngelo Theodorou Dec 21
@GDCPresoReviews well, considering that ARM bought Geomerics in December 2013, doing a bit of Enlighten marketing in early 2015 was a normal part of a sponsored session. 😄
Show threadGDC Presentation ReviewsDec 21
@encelo Huh! I didn’t know that. 👍