ARM Acquires Graphics Company Geometrics
On Friday ARM revealed that it has acquired graphics company Geomerics for an undisclosed amount.
Dubbed as the "leader in lighting technology" for the gaming and entertainment industries, Geomerics offers Enlighten, the world's first fully real-time global illumination technology. The acquisition will help ARM expand its position in the visual computing and graphics industries, while Geomerics can build on existing partnerships and accelerate development in mobile.
Typical mobile graphics applications today are limited to simple, direct lighting effects only. However, with global illumination, which provides advanced, photo realistic lighting effects in 3D graphics, effects such as compound reflections, refractions, shadows and other advanced effects are enabled. The result: more life-like graphics quality.
"The innovative technologies being developed by Geomerics are already revolutionizing the console gaming experience and are set to rapidly accelerate the transition to photo realistic graphics in mobile," said Pete Hutton, EVP & GM Media Processing Division, ARM. "Empowering Geomerics' portfolio with ARM's graphics capabilities and market reach will be transformative for the user experiences in future mobile and entertainment devices."
ARM's announcement boasts that Enlighten is the only solution proven to deliver fully dynamic lighting on today's PCs, game consoles and mobile platforms. In fact, you may have already seen this tech in action, as it's used in Battlefield 4 and Battlefield 3, Need for Speed Rivals, Eve Online and Medal of Honor: Warfighter.
Dr. Chris Doran, COO, Geomerics, said that the combination of ARM and Geomerics will accelerate the realization of their vision to bring next-generation console graphics to mobile devices. "Being part of ARM will allow us to accelerate our advanced developments for console and mobile platforms while also providing us with unmatched insights into the platforms and devices of tomorrow," Doran added.
The acquisition is seen as ARM's way of boosting its presence in the fast-growing mobile gaming scene. The company provides its own Mali graphics cores for phones and tablets to produce basic graphics, and the company's CPU cores are used in most smartphones and tablets on the market today. ARM will likely use this market leadership and technology to push for more high-end mobile gaming.
From their PDF
"Enlighten ships with a full baking workflow. This has all the benefits of
the real-time authoring process, but with the added functionality of
saving the results into high-quality lightmaps. The radiosity is computed
dynamically with Enlighten, and the direct lights are ray traced to
give the highest quality shadows in the final lightmaps. Each stage
of the calculation is separately stored so that advanced compositing
techniques can be applied when baking the final lightmaps."
And
Enlighten is available as a standalone SDK or pre-integrated into
the Unreal Engine. Enlighten also ships with a fully integrated Maya
viewport. This enables artists to preview the results of Enlighten without
leaving the Maya environment. Lighting conditions and textures can be
experimented on and finalised before exporting to the game engine.
mobile gaming is a 2 lane market, you cant sell hardware without software titles to back it up. Sony and Nintendo doesnt have many fears when it comes to game quality on the system. Historically, the strongest console of the bunch never outsold its competitors