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Intel Shows Off OpenGL ES 3.1 Android Games on Bay Trail

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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.

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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.

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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

Tessellation on

Tessellation off

 

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9 Comments Comment from the forums
  • jimmysmitty 21 March 2014 21:11
    Really need to see the power numbers but the graphics are pretty good. Would need to find games to compare.
    Reply
  • somebodyspecial 22 March 2014 02:25
    Gee, weren't bay trial tablets supposed to be here at xmas? I tried telling people those roadmaps showed it was only going to ship to vendors by xmas, which means product in april/may.Intel will be facing K1/S805 shortly and whatever Intel's GPU can do I'm pretty sure Kepler can do ;) S805 won't be a slouch either no doubt. Since NONE of the 3 are available yet, Intel again will lose in mobile. It's good to see Intel up their gpu game but they have to get more than a game or two working ;) I'm reminded of abysmal gpu driver support for their chipsets over the years with features taking 2yrs to get support at times.http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2013/11/21/qualcomm-extends-roadmap2c-product-lines2c-introduces-internet-processor.aspxAdreno 420 is supposed to be 40% faster than 330, but with a few less features than kepler of course. Either way mobile is clearly getting xbox360/ps3 quality games all this year and going forward will make you wonder if you really need an xbox1/ps4 as they move to 20nm and ratchet up performance all around. M1 will be 20nm (maxwell), and we already see they can drop power 40%+ even on 28nm, so how fast will a 20nm version be in mobile? With 20nm we may see a 2x perf increase over whatever K1 shows us as it REALLY is made from the ground up around low power uses (kepler is kind of like that, but maxwell one-ups it here). We should get better games than xbox360/ps3 then as far as graphics goes (gameplay still has to be there of course). Die shrinks will be affecting more than the gpu here also. You'll have faster ram next year etc to help these eclipse last gen consoles even more and encroach on extremely underpowered next gen consoles. At 10nm most likely won't even consider a xbox1/ps4 & devs won't either (see vita/3ds/wiiu, when games/devs aren't there neither are hardware sales). I mean would you program for say 10-20mil each of consoles (not more than that by xmas 2015 and we should see 14/16nm socs by then with 10nm a year or two later) or 1.5Billion+ units of mobile devices? These are easily ported to PC by then too, as they are running PC drivers/gpus basically, see OpenGL ES 3.1 speech at GDC this week). They only have to get close enough to make consoles pointless as desktop gpus moves to mobile along with all the driver experience & game dev experience. It takes years for devs to figure out every little nook and cranny on consoles to eke out perf, but all that work is done on desktops already so won't need to be relearned moving to mobile and tons of games will be easily ported over there from PS3/PS4/PC etc on opengl. It is easier to go from ps3/ps4 to mobile this year than from xbox1/xbox360 (directx) to anything mobile. Feel free to wave goodbye to consoles ;) I will be shocked if this gen sells 90-100mil each (wiiu is already out, it will never sell that many clearly). heck I'll be pretty shocked if they sell 1/2 of last gen. MS/Sony will have to give them away at massive losses soon (x360 cost MS 3B+ while PS3 cost Sony 4B+ in losses!) in order to pull off the last gen sales and even that won't save them. As they inch pricing up on mobile games (already hitting $20 on big titles, not .99 now on a lot of stuff), it becomes a no brainer to ignore consoles until last just due to the audience you can shoot at on mobile even at $10-20 game pricing. At $20 a game on mobile is 1/3 a console game cost. But there are FAR more than 3x the audience size on mobile so selling a game at 1/3 or even 1/6 the price can still easily make more than consoles (more like ~200x the size right now vs. next gen, IE infinity blade has made more per man hour than gears of war series says Epic Games, and it only runs on apple!). Devs are doing the math and going mobile as GDC 2013 shows. GDC 2014 shows PC is now #1 (53% making games for PC) and mobile just barely behind (51%) and consoles WAY behind."Fourteen percent of developers said they are currently developing games for PlayStation 4, versus 12 percent for Xbox One and 4 percent for Wii U."http://www.gdconf.com/news/gdc_state_of_the_industry_ps4_.htmlSo mobile/PC wins this year ;) A new release of consoles basically changed nothing, but PC up from 40% last year. WOW. Who said PC gaming was dead?...ROFL.
    Reply
  • lou007 22 March 2014 06:58
    So Intel joins the party 4 years too late and we should get excited pfff please!!
    Reply
  • sonofliberty08 22 March 2014 07:02
    intel graphics ? no thanks
    Reply
  • jimmysmitty 22 March 2014 07:59
    12938094 said:
    intel graphics ? no thanks

    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).
    Reply
  • Jaroslav Jandek 22 March 2014 10:00
    12937061 said:
    Gee, weren't bay trial tablets supposed to be here at xmas? I tried telling people those roadmaps showed it was only going to ship to vendors by xmas...
    Bay Trail tablets have been selling for about five months (for example, the ASUS T100 was actually one of the best selling tablets on the market a while ago - there were some articles about it on the net). This article is about Android support that was planned for 2014 (and now Intel delivered as promised).
    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).
    Reply
  • lockhrt999 22 March 2014 21:08
    intel graphics ? no thanks
    12938094 said:
    intel graphics ? no thanks
    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).
    Old gen bay trail is sported in one of the flagship lenovo mobile. That mobile released about 6-8 months before Nexus 5. Speaking from performance angle, this mobile killed nexus 5 in terms of performance. That's not all, despite being only 6mm thin, the mobile offers more battery backup than n5. Simply put Adreno 320 is no where as good as old intel graphics.
    Reply
  • foobar12 23 March 2014 10:23
    So Intel joins the party 4 years too late and we should get excited pfff please!!
    What are you talking about? They are the first to show GLES 3.1 - they are the first to the party here (as surprising as it is).
    Reply
  • Nicolas Hochard 24 March 2014 20:14
    Have you tired Mr President? This game could be the best answer to Russia for its attitude. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mrpresident.mrpresident.free let me know what you think about it, it's free
    Reply