A Complete Guide to Mobile Game Development
Trying to develop games that perform smoothly on any device? Arm’s tutorials, documentation, and tools for gaming developers show how to build better games, faster, whatever game engine you're using. Read the background on mobile gaming, and keep scrolling to get started.
Complete Deep Dive Guides
Optimize Game Performance
With 99% of smartphones running on Arm, you can leverage the power and efficiency of Arm-based processors to create your best games that perform smoothly on any device.
Documentation
- Arm Mali GPU Training Series: Video tutorials on how to optimize your applications when developing for Arm Immortalis and Arm Mali GPUs.
- Optimization Opportunities in Unity: Documentation introducing the ways you can optimize your Unity programs for better performance, including application processor, GPU, and asset optimizations.
- Optimizing Arm CPUs for Gaming on Android: Learn how to use the Android Dynamic Performance Framework (ADPF) to optimize games based on the dynamic thermal and CPU management features on Android, as well as how to get started with Neon/SVE2 intrinsics, and MTE on Android.
- Vulkan API Best Practices: Get the most out of the Vulkan API for Android, implementing cutting-edge technologies like ray tracing to improve graphics performance.
Tools as Part of Arm Performance Studio
- Performance Advisor: Intuitive summary reports pinpoint problem areas and cut down profiling time.
- Streamline: For deeper analysis of GPU and 32- and 64- bit CPU counters to find bottlenecks and optimize code.
- Arm Mali Offline Compiler: Investigate shader kernels to understand performance on Arm Mali GPUs.
- Frame Advisor: Analyze problem frames from a mobile application by capturing the API calls and rendering.
- RenderDoc for Arm GPUs: The industry-standard frame debugger with early support for Arm GPU extensions and Android features.
Tutorials
- Getting Started with Arm Performance Studio: Learning Path covering the basic features of each component and how to start profiling and optimizing your application.
- Get Started with Arm Frame Advisor (part of Arm Performance Studio): Video to learn how to use Arm Frame Advisor to analyze a problem frame in Android applications.
- Analyze a Frame with Frame Advisor: Learning Path teaching how to capture data from a significant frame in your application and find inefficiencies in your application.
- Install and Use Arm Integration Packages for Unity: Learning Path to get more insight into how your game performs on devices with Arm CPUs and GPUs.
Boost Game Visual Fidelity
Learn how to use ray tracing to create realistic mobile graphics with Vulkan API and Lumen for mobile, how to use materials and shaders accurately and effectively, and more.
Blogs
- Success in Mobile Games with Ray Tracing: Learn about the two approaches, techniques, and how to optimize performance.
- Techniques, Features and Trends to Optimize the Mobile Gaming Experience: A summary of tools and technologies that improve mobile game development and the overall user experience.
Tools as Part of Arm Performance Studio
- Graphics Analyzer: Analyze OpenGL ES and Vulkan API calls to determine exactly where rendering defects occur.
Documentation
- Ray Tracing Best Practices Guide: Recommendations of when to add ray tracing and ray queries to your graphics application, particularly on platforms powered by Arm GPUs.
- Artist Best Practices for Unreal Engine:
- Artist Best Practices for Unity: Documentation for lighting, geometry, materials, and shaders and textures. Want a tutorial instead? Access our Unity Learn course.
- Vulkan API Best Practices: Get the most out of the Vulkan API for Android, implementing cutting-edge technologies like ray tracing to improve graphics performance.
Tutorials
- Getting Started with Unity on Mobile: Learning Paths on how to use Unity's ML agents on Arm, how to use Arm integration packages, and more.
- Arm Performance Studio Graphic Analyzer: Learning Path showing how to connect your device, profile the application and analyze the capture.
- Analyze a Frame with Frame Advisor: Learning Path teaching how to capture data from a significant frame in your application and find inefficiencies in your application.
- Graphic Optimizations Case Studies: Arm Performance Studio: Video of step-by-step case studies from real-world examples to show how developers can use our profiling tools.
- Getting started with Vulkan API AFRC: Learning Path on how to query for fixed-rate compression support, specify what compression to use, and verify that compression is applied.
Harness AI Capabilities
Learn about the latest AI innovations to unlock even better performance, from generative AI to neural networks.
- Using Unity’s Machine Learning Agents on Arm [Learning Path]: Learn how to get the Unity ML Agents toolkit running in a game that is deployable to Arm-powered Android devices.
- Generative AI is on Mobile and it’s Powered by Arm [Blog]: Read about the exciting new developments that demonstrate the advanced AI capabilities of the Arm CPU.
- Unity ML-Agents on Arm and How We Created Game AI [Video]: Learn how to train non-player characters in games with machine learning agents in Unity.
- Streamlining Large AI Models for Games with Quantization [Video]: This talk highlights an implementation of quantization to significantly reduce the computational requirement of these models.
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