Of the 7.59 billion people worldwide, 3 billion gamers are played! That is, 1 in every 2.5 people is a gamer.
According to Newzoo's 2021 Global Gaming Market Report, 2.8 billion of these 3 billion people play games via mobile devices. The movement is coming like a storm! The game's "fragrant food" also allows more and more people to see the opportunities.
Mobile games: Driving the underlying terminals from general to specialized Remember that from 2013 to 2015, a coal mining company invested in game companies to lay out mobile games; a film and television company invested in game companies; an advertising company invested in mobile game companies... Traditional Internet companies and industrial companies have sniffed the layout of mobile game business opportunities, and the crazy past is still vividly remembered. In just 9 years, with the opportunity to change features to smartphones, mobile games have shown their huge explosive power. According to the "2021 Global Game Market Report" released by Newzoo, the global game market will reach $175.8 billion in 2021, of which mobile games will reach $90.7 billion, accounting for more than half of total revenue. The gaming industry is already larger than the global film and music industries combined. At the same time, the Chinese market is also keeping up with the international pace, according to the "2021 China Game Industry Report" jointly released by the Game Working Committee of the China Music and Digital Association (GPC) and the China Game Industry Research Institute a few days ago, the size of China's game market reached 296.513 billion yuan, an increase of 17.826 billion yuan over last year, an increase of 6.4% year-on-year, and mobile games still occupy the mainstream of the domestic game market, with total revenue accounting for 76.06%, reaching 225.538 billion yuan. Mobile games have developed all the way down, from the pixel-style games presented by the early functional machines, controlled by physical buttons, to the main touch screen interaction in the smart phone era, and the early light leisure such as match-3, to the development of today's games are becoming more and more heavy, and the screen can even be comparable to the host and terminal games. The charm of the game this piece of "fragrant food", and even the trend of many hardware terminal companies for its "customization". In recent years, game phones and e-sports mobile phones have become more and more common, such as ROG game mobile phone 2, e-sports game flagship Red Devil 3S, Nubia Red Devil 3 e-sports mobile phone, Lenovo Savior e-sports mobile phone 2 Pro... In addition to the above mobile phones that specialize in games and e-sports, the new product configurations of many mobile phone manufacturers are also inclined to the game side. From general to specialized, terminals are experiencing such a development path. The earliest mobile phone existed as a communication terminal, backwards from thrift to luxury, constantly superimposed functions, making it a "complete body". But when all the functions are integrated, it is found that behind the "big and complete", it is impossible to make every item extreme. Behind the increasingly high and more demanding requirements of users, it also prompts terminal enterprises to re-examine product positioning, more inclined to "customize", and customize products suitable for different groups of people. If you position a camera phone and move towards the goal of a single reflex, you will inevitably give up some performance other than image processing; and under the positioning of games and e-sports mobile phones, it is mainly to present a stronger image picture effect, while having strong screen rendering processing capabilities, as well as excellent heat dissipation functions. Judging from the development of the game market and the current terminal action, the battle of the game "customized" terminal has just begun. Now, lower-level chip platforms have also joined the battle.
How far is the mobile gaming experience from the console and PC "next generation"?
At the 2021 Snapdragon Technology Summit in early December, Qualcomm brought a number of blockbuster new products. The new generation of Snapdragon 8 mobile platform, referred to as Snapdragon 8 Gen1 or Snapdragon 8, the name has become simpler, but the performance continues to soar, triggering Xiaomi, Motorola, realme, OPPO, OnePlus, ZTE and many other mainstream mobile phone manufacturers to rush to announce that they will release flagship new machines based on the Snapdragon 8 mobile platform.
At the same time, it also brings the 1st generation of Snapdragon G3x game platform specifically for games, which supports running all Android games, cloud game content, and can use streaming technology to smooth the game console or PC side of the game. The first handheld game device development kit equipped with the Snapdragon G3x game platform was jointly developed with Razer and was also released at the meeting.
The development of mobile terminals has been closely related to the development of terminal technology and network transmission. From the perspective of display effects, the screen resolution of mobile phones has undergone leapfrog development in recent years, 240P, 360P, 480P, 720P, 1080P, 2K, 4K, and now the mainstream mobile phone resolution has reached 2K, and even 4K resolution mobile phones have appeared. The same is true of refresh rates, 30Hz, 60Hz, 72Hz, 90Hz, 120Hz, 144Hz, and the highest mobile phone screen refresh rate has reached 240Hz today. The higher the refresh rate, the more images are presented per second, and the smoother the final concatenated picture becomes. In terms of network, from the early 3G to 4G, and then to today's 5G network, from the intuitive download speed, the 3G theoretical download speed is about 120K/s-600K/s, while the download speed of the 4G network is 1.5M/s-10M/s. 5G before the official commercial rate measurement: the maximum downstream rate reached 1617Mbps, the lowest is 75Mbps. It is precisely because of the improvement of communication speed that large-scale MMO such as "Tianya Mingyue Knife" and "Sword Net 3" and MOBA types such as "Glory of Kings" and "League of Legends Mobile Game Edition" can sweep the market. Qualcomm, founded in 1985, first launched CDMA in wireless communication technology, which is widely used in the 3G era, and Qualcomm has contributed to the development of 3G, 4G and 5G mobile communication technologies. While developing wireless communication technology, its mobile SoC has also become one of the important underlying technical supports in the entire mobile era. Following the trend, so many years of development, Qualcomm has cultivated a sensitive sense of smell, layout XR, games are its prejudged wise choices. The Snapdragon 8 Gen1 and Snapdragon G3x released this time have made many optimizations for the game. Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 compared with the previous generation of Snapdragon 888 chips, which uses a new ARM V9 instruction set, CPU performance increased by 20%, GPU performance increased by 30%, power consumption decreased by 25%, with the Snapdragon 8 mobile platform 3.0GHz Cortex-X2 super core + 3 Cortex-A710 large cores and four Cortex-A510 small cores, to achieve the overall performance ratio of the combination, to achieve the overall performance ratio of the combination. It is worth noting that the Snapdragon 8 GPU is the largest performance improvement for mobile terminals, and the performance improvement of games based on Vulkan API can reach 60%, which is a game performance surge and the embodiment of Qualcomm Snapdragon's commitment to the mobile game terminal game experience. Stereoscopic rendering, which includes very high-end graphics technology for console games and terminal games, has now also been brought to mobile. In order to create the ultimate mobile gaming experience, Snapdragon 8 introduced the 4th generation Snapdragon Elite Gaming complete solution with "end game level" features. It is understood that as of now, Snapdragon Elite Gaming supports more than 50 game features, and supports more than 800 million smartphones.
The new generation of Snapdragon Elite Gaming brings the Adreno graphic motion engine. It can optimize motion estimation through historical frame data and GPU, generate more frames for running game games, so that the game can run at double the frame rate, but the power consumption does not increase, making the Snapdragon 8 mobile platform for high frame rate games can already fully cope, which gives strong support to more games in the future on this indicator. Snapdragon 8 is also optimized for CPU multi-threading, occlusion culling, delayed rendering, vertex shader load, etc., effectively reducing the GPU workload caused by computing, reducing the efficacy, improving frame rate stability, and not overheating in temperature control, bringing a smoother and more stable game experience. It is understood that with the support of the Snapdragon 8 mobile platform, "Glory of the King" now supports 120FPS operation, and "Peace Elite" can also support 90FPS. Even the most interesting thing in the industry is that the touchstone "Original God" in the industry can run stably and smoothly at the level of 60FPS when running in full image quality. In response to whether the light chasing effect on the PC side that many players are most concerned about can be achieved on the mobile end, Dave Durnil, senior director of game technology at Qualcomm Technology and head of Snapdragon Game Studio, said, "Regarding light chasing technology, this technology is very critical in terms of application. At present, some manufacturers say that they want to use the technology on the software side, which cannot actually bring about a huge improvement in user experience. What we want to see is to use it on the hardware side, and this depends on whether the ecosystem is ready to accept such technologies and make them better implemented. In addition, in terms of connectivity, Qualcomm's 5G millimeter wave and Sub-6GHz frequency bands can achieve high reliability and low latency to support efficient transmission, which can solve the demand for large bandwidth and high network capacity in densely populated areas. According to Ookla Speedtest's self-paced data based on U.S. users using commercial terminals, 5G millimeter wave is 19 times faster than the 5G Sub-6GHz band, making it particularly suitable for network deployments in densely populated cities and metropolitan areas. This provides a reliable guarantee for the multiplayer immediacy of mobile games. Snapdragon G3x gaming platform Snapdragon G3x is a platform specially customized for gaming devices.
Its highlights are mainly in the following aspects: the ultra-smooth gaming experience with 144FPS support, and the 10-bit HDR gaming experience with more than 1 billion colors; as mentioned earlier, the high frame rate represents the smoothness of the picture; the Qualcomm FastConnect 6900 mobile connection system supports a powerful connection experience, and its supported Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E enable low latency and high-speed upload and download. When running bandwidth-critical games online through Xbox Cloud Gaming or steam remote play services, 5G mmWave and Sub-6GHz enable ultra-high-speed, stutter-free cloud gaming experiences. Snapdragon Sound Snapdragon Listening technology is optimized for sound quality, latency and robustness, allowing gamers to listen to the sound and identify positions and experience all the dynamics of the game environment in an immersive way. With the support of AKSys, the 1st Generation Snapdragon G3x gaming platform is able to provide precise touch-to-game controller mapping technology, enabling the built-in game controller to adapt widely to games. Connect XR Viewer to devices powered by the 1st Generation Snapdragon G3x gaming platform via USB-C to enable a multi-screen enhanced experience. The platform also enables the terminal to act as a companion controller to drive the 4K display screen.
In the past, it was almost unimaginable to achieve an experience comparable to the terminal tour and host in the mobile terminal, but in fact, it was not necessary to use the performance of the mobile terminal to face the performance of the PC and the host, but in the subjective experience of the person, because people's sense of technical parameters is limited. For example, according to the formula given by Apple to the Retina design standard, when the pixel density of the mobile phone display reaches or exceeds 300ppi, it will no longer appear grainy; the pixel density of the handheld flat panel display will no longer appear grainy when the pixel density reaches or exceeds 260ppi. It is understood that the visual frame rate when the human eye is comfortable and relaxed is 24FPS, and the concentration does not exceed 30FPS. When you blink your eyes, you can instantly capture more than 30FPS. So why do you need 120FPS or even 144FPS, this is because the human eye can't "vertically synchronize" with the game screen. The role of VSY is to prevent the picture from tearing. Because the rendering of the picture is not rendered together by the whole picture, it is rendered row by row or column by column. If vsync is turned off and the configuration is not enough, the picture will be torn off at high speed before the picture is rendered. So you can only make the images you see coherent by increasing the number of frames. Although at present, from the perspective of parameters, the mobile terminal still has a certain distance from the host and the PC, but from the perspective of human visual sensory experience, the effect of the mobile terminal has been completely comparable to the host and the PC side.