Intel Shows Off OpenGL ES 3.1 Android Games on Bay Trail
Intel gets serious with mobile gaming and embraces OpenGL ES 3.1 support -- and more -- on Bay Trail.
Android-based Intel Bay Trail tablets have yet to hit the market, but Intel is showing off early hardware running that demonstrates the graphical prowess of its own solution.
F1 Race Stars
Intel is the only vendor at GDC showing off hardware running a real OpenGL ES 3.1 game. The first title that we got to go hands-on with is Codemasters' F1 Race Stars, which takes advantage of OpenGL ES 3 features such as HDR lighting, glows, bloom effects. OpenGL ES 3.1 extends feature set to enable more efficient rendering, and brings the API very close to what's possible with DirectX 11. Bay Trail's performance has also allowed Codemasters to pile on 10 times the number of particles.
SSX
EA Montreal's SSX is the other real game running on Intel's Bay Trail Android tablet. It's essentially a port of SSX on the PS3 but now to Android – a pretty impressive feat when you consider that the console experience is now being shrunken into a portable one. EA Montreal had to optimize its content for mobile, which involved moving from deferred to immediate rendering, porting shaders to GLSL, updating memory management, among others.
Kishonti Benchmark
One other OpenGL ES 3.1 demo wasn’t a game, but rather Kishonti's GFXBench benchmark software. (Read our in-depth look at GFXBench 3.0 here.) The next version of Kishonti's benchmark was on for preview, and showed a tessellation demo running live. Tessellation itself isn't a part of the OpenGL ES 3.1 spec, but it's already available extension packs from Intel.
More Tessellation
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While compared to a AMD APU, in this market space Intel only has to go against what is currently up in the ARM territory and their GPUs are not as powerful as this (it is basically a bit lower clocked Ivy Bridge IGP).
The only comparable SoC (3D-performance-wise) from ARM is the Snapdragon 800, but it also consumes much more power (in 3D workloads)...
Also, the Bay Trail on Windows is pretty impressive - it can run games like League of Legends and Starcraft 2 @ 40-60 fps (considering it has 2W SDP).