ARM Acquires Graphics Company Geometrics

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By Kevin Parrish
published

ARM is pushing for console-like graphics in the mobile arena.

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.

Kevin Parrish
4 Comments Comment from the forums
  • masmotors
    good for arm i like my high or semi high end gaming on pc so amd and intel have nothing to fear but on mobile platform this is real good for them and making trouble for nintendo and sony
    Reply
  • rwinches
    Yeah so it's SW they call technology. Even when describing their product the marketing language never lets up. The fact that it sounds like a good solution and a good acquisition does manage to come through.
    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.
    Reply
  • dudewitbow
    12182406 said:
    good for arm i like my high or semi high end gaming on pc so amd and intel have nothing to fear but on mobile platform this is real good for them and making trouble for nintendo and sony

    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
    Reply
  • IInuyasha74
    That's true. Console winners are usually those with the cheapest cost and best games for it. Crazy expensive and you lose, hardware that is too far behind you lose, and no games to take advantage of your system you lose. Android has some good games, but nothing that really requires better graphics.
    Reply