The 10-year-old popular mobile game is Angry Birds and Ninja Cut Fruit.
Today's popular mobile games 10 years later are "Glory of kings", "Peace Elite" and "Original God".
The biggest change in mainstream mobile games in the past 10 years comes from the change in picture quality. With the higher and higher mobile phone configuration, the picture quality of mobile games has more space to fly themselves, and even begin to look at the PC, which is one of the reasons why there will be "Original God" as a multi-platform game that spans mobile phones, PCs and consoles.
However, while mobile games are improving, the picture quality of the end game is also improving. In recent years, thanks to ray tracing technology, the virtual world created by PC and console games such as Minecraft, Cyberpunk 2077, and Watchdog: Legion has become more shocking and immersive in addition to the gameplay of the game itself.
So is it possible for mobile games to also run a light chase and get a picture quality comparable to the PC level?
Yes.
Make the picture more realistic and realistic
Light chasing, the full name is ray tracing, this name comes from the English "Ray Tracing", but what really makes the concept of light chasing into thousands of households is the new "gas stove" launched by NVIDIA in 2018 - RTX20 series graphics cards. Previously, due to insufficient hardware performance, light chase was mainly used in film and television fields such as movies and animations that did not require real-time rendering.
In the process of graphics rendering, light tracing is a rendering method used to determine the visibility of different elements. Its principle is to emit a ray of light from the player's point of view, hit a point on the screen, and then the light is reflected, refracted, absorbed and other calculations according to the surface characteristics of the reflective surface, and then a more realistic picture is constructed.
For example, the protagonist brushes his teeth in front of the mirror, the light on the ceiling shines on the face, and the light reflected through the skin will be reflected back to the mirror, wall and other objects, and then these objects will be reflected in a round, and finally the light reflected many times will be sent to the user's eyes. Ray tracing is to simulate this scenario, tracing the propagation behavior of each ray.
At present, there are two main ways to achieve ray tracing:
One is ray tracing real-time rendering, imitating the propagation behavior of real light, providing great convenience for the simulation of many light and shadow effects, in the shadow of the object, in the content performance of the mirror reflection, ray tracing can be simulated in a very natural way. Relatively, but due to the need to calculate the light reflection in real time, the amount of repeated calculation is large, and there are very high requirements for hardware performance.
On the left is the principle of rasterization, and on the right is the ray-traced path
The other is raster rendering, find out which pixels in the screen need to be rendered, and then use the GPU to calculate the pixel rendering as needed, equivalent to a radish a pit, at the same time as long as the calculation can be done once, reducing memory transmission. However, in order to render more realistically, raster rendering requires the use of very complex algorithms and a large number of intermediate rendered objects to simulate advanced effects, which involves the complexity of the algorithm and memory management issues, which increases the difficulty of writing and maintaining the renderer.
It is worth noting that the above two methods are not opposites and can be applied co-existently, and most of the games that support light chasing on the PC platform are hybrid implementations of two rendering technologies that complement each other.
It can be seen that the game screen after the PC side turns on the light chase will have a light effect closer to real life, and there will be a more obvious contrast in the scene with more mirrors. But because of this, some light-chasing scenes may not necessarily be brighter as imagined, but may also be darker, such as in game scenes with fewer light sources.
Therefore, after turning on the light chase, it is possible to make the game screen more shocking, realistic and realistic. Perhaps for the same reason, the mobile phone industry is now interested in introducing the function of light chasing to smartphones.
"Mobile Game Terminal Game"
Light chase appeared in the field of computer games because of the rise in hardware performance, and the same thing actually happened on mobile phone processors.
In recent years, with the improvement of mobile phone processor GPUs and heterogeneous computing capabilities year by year, the concept of "mobile game terminal game" has been increasingly mentioned by manufacturers. But mobile phones and PCs are not the same, the former has a very strict power constraints, even if equipped with a powerful flagship chip, may not dare to let its full firepower, naturally it is impossible to adjust the power almost arbitrarily, and limited by the size of the mobile phone space, it is not very realistic to arrange heat dissipation like a PC.
Compared to the radical performance and hardware combination of the PC, the smartphone is a bit the opposite. For example, Huawei and Honor's GPU Turbo, Qualcomm's VRS variable frame rate rendering, etc., are all under the premise of ensuring game performance, as far as possible to reduce the system burden.
But under such a premise, the introduction of light chasing on mobile phones will bring what kind of experience or how to achieve it, which is actually a very interesting topic.
Since the hardware-level light chasing rendering threshold is too high, then go software.
In 2019, NetEase and Huawei achieved ray tracing on "Meet the Cold Water", when two applications of light chase special effects were introduced, namely soft shadows and frosted mirror reflections. In the official demonstration video, after turning on the light chase, there will be a more obvious difference from the original picture.
The most important thing is to turn on the power consumption after light tracking, according to NetEase's slides, when achieving the same reflection effect, the power consumption and performance performance of real-time ray tracing are better than rasterization.
For example, in this mirrored scene, the power consumption per frame used in Ray Tracing and raster rendering used in Meets The Cold Water is 15.84mA19.04mA, respectively, but when there are multiple mirrors in the scene, the power consumption per frame during ray tracing and raster rendering is 19.7mA and 63.43mA, respectively.
Although compared to the PC, the above scenario is not complicated, or even a little simple, but after all, it is implemented on the mobile phone. The demo was based on the Kirin 990 platform, which had a GPU module of the 660MHz ARM Mali-G76 MP16, which was less than 5 percent of the performance of the desktop Radeon RX 5700 XT.
Therefore, the implementation method of "Meet the Cold Water" is most likely to be solved in a software way, directly using the general computing unit of the GPU to achieve light tracking, rather than accelerating the implementation through the hardware optical chase kernel like RTX.
Then, in 2021, by integrating Huawei's HMS Core Scene Kit, Tianzhi Mobile Game broke through the computing power limitation of real-time ray tracing technology on the mobile platform, and achieved a high frame rate of 60fps and 1080p, and high-quality performance. This means that after turning on the light chase, you can still have a great gaming experience.
Celestial mobile game + Huawei ray-traced rendering technology
Although it can't be compared to a PC platform, this at least means that the initial real-time ray tracing processing is already possible on flagship phones. Now smartphone light chasing in addition to the development of technology, but also began to become more and more platform, so that as many developers as possible to participate in the development of light chase.
On December 15, 2020, the Khronos Vulkan Ray Tracing Working Group - TSG, Tay Tracking Task Sub Group announced the launch of a new version of the Vulkan SDK, and the light tracking rendering API was officially included.
On October 14, 2021, MediaTek officially launched the mobile optical tracking SDK solution based on the Vulkan extension and jointly demonstrated the real-time ray tracing technology on mobile terminals with ARM and Tencent Games.
Both SDKs are open source, and Vulkan-based open source optical tracking technology is compatible with more devices in the industry standard, and it is also convenient for developers to access. But this does not mean that mobile phone manufacturers can wait for ready-made, on the contrary, there are still many things to do.
OPPO ray tracing demo
At last year's OPPO Developer Conference, OPPO also launched its own light chasing rendering technology, since there are already open source technology solutions, why do mobile phone manufacturers still need to carry out light chase technology research?
First of all, in addition to the Vulkan-based SDK, other game engine manufacturers such as Unity will also launch their own light-chasing engines, and different game developers will develop games according to different game engines, which is bound to form different levels of light-chasing effects, performance requirements, and power consumption requirements; secondly, after game development, it is necessary to dock mobile phone chip platforms with different performance levels.
If mobile phone manufacturers do not go down to research, I am afraid it is difficult to balance and adjust the experience differences caused by different game engines and different performance chips, so it is more necessary for manufacturers to understand the basic requirements of mobile phone light chasing chips as soon as possible.
In addition, the grasp of mobile phone manufacturers for light chase will actually feed back to game manufacturers. Light chasing is very good, but it may not be a cost-effective choice for game manufacturers, because it may not be because the hardware performance is not strong enough, and it may also affect the operation of the mobile game itself, and in reality they will adopt a more conservative strategy.
If the mobile phone manufacturer has enough grasp of the light chase, the user can feel the experience upgrade brought by the light chase, so that the game manufacturer is profitable, naturally there is a greater driving force to upgrade the game, and even let the manufacturer and the game manufacturer work together to promote the game engine operation, development and upgrading, and finally implemented to the hardware level, to create a more unified industry standard, driving the benefit of the whole industry, so that the mobile phone light chase is not just a page of PPT, but the experience upgrade that can be felt by opening a game at will.
Do mobile games need light chase?
In the initial line of thought, I thought it would be a soul question, and people sometimes needed a strong reason to convince themselves that they needed this new thing, but in the long-term ideological struggle, I completed the closed loop of thought.
"Do I need light chase to play mobile games?" The answer to this question depends on what kind of light chasing game effects can be provided by mobile phone manufacturers and game developers, and whether it will affect the premise of high image quality and high frame rate. From a more macroscopic point of view, production determines demand, and when the "production" of light chase is in place, the "demand" will naturally open smoothly.
But in reality, this closed loop seems to be a little dangerous to collapse, because at present, domestic mobile phone manufacturers have more important things to do in terms of performance. Two years ago, the rendering quality of "Glory of the King" and "Crash 3" can reach 1080P, or even 1080P+, but today some mobile phones in order to balance power consumption and heat, the game rendering resolution is probably only 720P, of course, this can not all blame the mobile phone manufacturers, after all, there is only a bowl of rice, you do not have to eat.
Therefore, reducing power consumption and heat generation is probably the first problem to be solved by the current smart phone. In contrast, game phones seem to have more conditions to pursue mobile phone light chasing, which is not one of the directions that distinguish game phones from conventional mobile phones.
Of course, for users, light chase is more than the meaning of the game, but also can be used to improve the visual effects of the system, make more gorgeous themes or wallpapers, and make the sophistication of the mobile phone interface to a higher level. If the hardware performance is sufficient, it can naturally be used in the field of AR and VR.
As the performance of the mobile phone processor becomes stronger and stronger, the light chase may gradually become the standard on the mobile phone like the high refresh rate that was once there. However, if this day comes as soon as possible, mobile phone manufacturers still have to solve the commercialization of mobile phone light chase as soon as possible, and enough application layers can truly promote the landing of mobile phone light chase, so that as many users as possible can feel the novel game experience brought by light chase on the mobile phone.