Category: Mobile Gaming

Imagination Technologies shows off new PowerVR chipsets.

The semiconductor company has recently previewed its new Wizard series of ray tracing graphics processing units (GPUs), which could eventually result in extremely realistic mobile gaming graphics.

A demonstration video showed what ray tracing technology can do when combined with traditional raster graphics.

The demo of Imagination’s PowerVR ray tracing technology revealed game graphics that had lifelike light reflections and refractions, shadows with high resolution, and glass and plastic materials with realistic translucency. Furthermore, this technology not only produces true-to-life graphics, but it does it at amazing speeds.

“These are the features that ray tracing can improve in terms of mobile gaming,” said Alexandru Voica, the PR specialist at Imagination Technologies. He went on to say that “We’ve taken the Unity 5 game engine and then we did all the work that was required to add ray tracing inside the game engine.”

According to Imagination, greater performance advancements are likely to result from real-world implementations because the GPUs can be incorporated right into SoC (system on a chip) designs. The company’s goal is to implement this technology into the GPUs of consumers, sooner rather than later.

The innovative graphics technology is suitable for mobile gaming.

Ray tracing is a technique used to create an image generated by the computer where the paths of single rays of light are calculated according to the materials that are encountered in the setting. Its effects are particularly clear when viewing a scene that is made up of intricate reflections. This is what allows the technology to produce lifelike graphics.

This method is not new and has been utilized in computer graphics for a long time. However, whereas traditional ray tracing needs substantial processing power, Imagination’s technology is much faster and is being used in real-time applications like video games.

The new Wizard GPUs that have been developed by Imagination Technologies reduce the memory and power needed for real-time ray tracing, which allows it to work for mobile games. The first of its Wizard series GPUs has 128 ALU (arithmetic logic unit) cores and 4 unified shading clusters that deliver as many as 300 million rays every second.

Apple has established a multi-year licensing deal with Imagination Technologies, which provides Apple access to the semiconductor firm’s extensive range of present and upcoming video IP cores and PowerVR graphics. This could prove very beneficial to Apple’s mobile gaming future.

Mobile gaming is more than just a fad

The game industry is beginning to evolve as it puts more focus on the mobile sector. The mobile games market has been heavily saturated for some time, but large publishers and development studios that had initially been averse to the concept of mobile gaming are beginning to enter into the market with their own products. As mobile gaming continues to grow in popularity, the practices that have become common in the mobile gaming business are also becoming common in the overall game industry.

The game industry has been focusing more heavily on the mobile sector for good reason. Mobile games represent one of the most lucrative aspects of gaming today, with some 247 separate game companies earning more than $1 million in mobile revenue in the U.S. alone. Google, which provides access to a wide range of mobile gaming applications, has seen more than 300 million downloads for the mobile games it supports, with the developers of these games bringing in a collective $600 million. These may be astonishing numbers, but Google is widely considered within the game industry to be the least lucrative market for mobile gaming applications.

Many people enjoy mobile games because they are simple in nature and can be played anywhere and at any time. They offer on-demand entertainment that people have come to expect thanks to their growing reliance on mobile technology. Moreover, people have shown that they are willing to spend money on these games, whether it is the price for purchasing the game or buying in-game items, digital currencies, and bonuses that make gameplay more enjoyable.

Microtransactions, a term that represents in-game purchases, have become somewhat infamous among consumers. Some people claim that mobile games are nothing more than cash grabs, using microtransactions to take advantage of people that are willing to spend their money. These microtransactions are becoming a more integral part of traditional gaming, with developers and publishers introducing in-game purchases in order to cater to a more mobile-centric audience.  As mobile games continue to gain prominence, they may end up determining the course of the game industry’s future, which may cause a serious division between consumers and game developers that have an interest in microtransactions.