TechDomino
Qualcomm has begun a partnership with Unity Technologies, which make the very popular mobile gaming engine, Unity. This could mean that Qualcomm is finally getting serious about gaming, even though their GPU line, Adreno, which was bought from from AMD a few years ago.
Nvidia’s Tegra has almost become the defacto chip for games on Android, due to better optimized games for it, and also because of the Tegra Zone store, and the promotion Nvidia does for it. Qualcomm has had a store app for games for a while, too, called GameCommand, but they’ve never really promoted it, and it didn’t include that many good or impressive games, either.
The partnership with Unity means that a lot of games will be optimized for Qualcomm’s chips from day one. Unity is also the most popular gaming engine with developers because it offers support for both Android and iOS, as well as many other platforms, which means it’s very for developers to port their Unity games from other platform to another.
This partnership is a big win for both Qualcomm and Unity, because Unity also gets to optimize their customers’ games on the most popular chips out there, considering Qualcomm owns more than half of the mobile chip market. But it will be up to Qualcomm to promote their store and optimized games, just like Nvidia does it with Tegra Zone.
One big issue for Qualcomm is that they will need to make better GPU’s and better drivers, otherwise those optimizations will not be enough. Nvidia has a big advantage here because of their expertise in making GPU’s for a long time and in writing drivers for those GPU’s.
Plus Nvidia has announced Tegra 5 will be using the full PC GPU architecture, Kepler, which also comes with full OpenGL 4.3 support. It remains to be seen how efficient that will be in a mobile chip, but it could help developers create much more impressive games than the ones we see now with OpenGL ES 2.0, and even future OpenGL ES 3.0 games.
If OpenGL 4.3 turns out to be a big success for Nvidia in Tegra 5, then Qualcomm will need to make chips that support it, too, and the hardest part will be writing the drivers for it, which could take them quite a few years. Still it’s encouraging to see other chip makers besides Nvidia try to get developers to make beautiful looking games, and I wish Samsung did the same for their Exynos chips, too. Perhaps when they will see Qualcomm working on this, they will begin partnering up with Epic Games for the Unreal 4 engine.
[Via BSN]
