ARM is set to announce its new premium IP on 26 May, promising to push the boundaries of graphics and optimize mobile gaming experiences.

Arm says that the next Arm IP will see a continuation a strong GPU performance and efficiency story for mobile gaming.

Paul Williamson, VP and GM of Client in Arm said: "If we are to enable compute-intensive premium gaming titles on mobile, then we need more performant and efficient architecture, products and solutions for SoCs on mobile. This is what we will be bringing through our latest Premium Mali GPU, so stay tuned for more details."

The games industry is experiencing a shift in focus towards being ‘mobile-first’. Even game studios that have traditionally focused on developing only PC and console games are putting their resources into developing more mobile titles. This trend is supported by the stats.

Looking at revenues, mobile is the largest gaming segment and will remain so towards 2022. According to the market intelligence agency Newzoo, mobile accounted for more than 46 percent of the global games market in 2019, reaching $68.2 Billion in revenues.

This growth – accompanied by other factors, such as the ongoing 5G rollout and emergence of cloud gaming – is seeing more premium gaming titles come to mobile. Users are moving towards playing very popular high-fidelity, multi-user games, such as Fortnite and PUBG, on mobile devices as well as their consoles. However, they are still expecting similar quality. Arm wants to support game developers by providing the IP, technologies and tools that push the boundaries of graphics and optimize mobile gaming experiences.

Recently, the game and technology development company Crytek has been laying the foundation for its renowned CRYENGINE to support a full mobile tool suite. The game development platform is well-known for its industry-leading renderer, real-time lighting and optimized VR support for PC and console. Mobile is now so powerful that many game developers are able to run mobile games off the same game engine that they use for PC and console.

The beta program of CRYENGINE on mobile is being launched later in 2020. Crytek is partnering with Google and Arm to bring the engine to the Android ecosystem first. This is seen as the first step in bringing Crytek’s games to more mobile platforms. Arm have also worked with Crytek and Google to ensure that Crytek’s flagship ‘Neon Noir’ demo fully utilizes Vulkan on Arm Mali to achieve outstanding graphic fidelity.

Neon Noir is a preview of the type of content that will be available on premium mobile devices.

“Neon Noir was used as a graphics benchmarking standard for PC just over a year ago. The fact that this demo now runs smoothly in an excess of 30 frames per second (FPS) on mobile highlights the exponential rise in capability, compute, and visual fidelity achievable on mobile today”, says Theodor Mader, Technical Director CRYENGINE, Crytek. “Arm’s highly performant and power efficient IP, along with the vast developer resources available, makes it easy to optimize content on their architecture. This is the key to achieving such impressive results.”

The latest Samsung Galaxy S20 was used to support running the CRYENGINE game engine in Mali. The Samsung Galaxy S20 is running on Exynos 990 which incorporates a Mali-G77 MP11 GPU. Launched in 2019, Mali-G77 is the first premium Arm GPU based on the brand new Valhall architecture. The GPU helps to deliver high-end graphics and longer battery life on mobile.