The Game Developer Conference is the go-to event for the gaming industry, where the developer community comes together to discover, learn and talk about what’s new and exciting in the gaming world: and Imagination is delighted to be there at booth S744.

First up we have two speaking events. Our senior research engineer Hamish Todd will be speaking on Tuesday 21st March on “Math in Game Development Summit: A Visual Guide to Quaternions and Dual Quaternions.” In case you didn’t know, a dual quaternion is a mathematical concept that is used to represent rigid body transformations in 3D space and are used in computer graphics to represent the position and orientation of objects in 3D space. They are not, as I initially thought, an alien race from Star Trek. Hamish is giving the talk at both 13:20 and again at 14:40, so you have more chances to fit it around your schedule or listen to it twice.

Panel beating

The other event is a panel discussion entitled “Open-Source Advancements of AAA Mobile Graphics”, which we are proud to sponsor in partnership with OPPO and O3DE. This is the sort of thing we love doing as we get to hear different voices and opinions as we discuss the latest developments in the industry. At the panel, our director of mobile ecosystem and gaming, Tyrran Ferguson, will be in conversation with handset manufacturer Oppo, the Linux Foundation and game studios Persistent and Carbonated, to discuss how we can move the mobile industry forward with cutting-edge, open-source rendering engines with exciting new features such as ray tracing.

If you pop down to our booth, we’ll also be showing a bunch of cool demos. One of these is our “cloud gaming” demo. We’ve been talking about multi-core GPUs for some time and it’s great to be able to show it here as a proof of concept.

Quad-core graphics

In the demo, you’ll see an Innosilicon Fantasy One board boasting a quad-core Imagination BXT-32-1024 MC4 CPU with four applications running concurrently and independently on its own core. Three of the four are games created with the Unity game engine using the Universal Render Pipeline, two of which use the Vulkan® API and one using OpenGL®. The OS is Linux Ubuntu 18.04. The fourth application shows our automotive surround-view demo.

The surround-view demo, which is also on show on its own, showcases several different technologies together. A Renesas R-Car H3 platform featuring an Imagination PowerVR GPU showcases how our GPUs can be used to create advanced surround-view applications for next-gen cars. In this demo, a photorealistic car interior and exterior created using physically-based rendering and image-based lighting techniques has real-time perspective-corrected images from four external cameras projected onto the car along with animated 3D objects. While strictly speaking this is an automotive feature rather than a game, the cars are created using tools commonly employed in the game development workflow/pipeline and shows how game development and photorealistic rendering continue to converge.

Play and win!

To keep you entertained at our booth you’ll find several interactive demos for you to pick up and play. Running on Vivo Y77 and Motorola G73 smartphones, featuring our IMG BXM-8-256 GPU technology you’ll be able to customise a car’s bodywork, chill out with a Llama in a jungle, or rock out in a concert and try and rack up points by paying a rhythm game.

We also have a cool, platformer game, running on a Retroid Pocket 3, which we took a look at a few months ago. Give the game a go and the highest score will win an Xbox Elite game controller! The fun game features “GooMan”, which you might recognise from our recent ray tracing demos.

Finally, if you’re a developer you’ll have a chance to see our PVRCarbon and PVRTune tools in action. You’ll see the Unity Boat Attack demo running on the Innosilicon Fantasy One board and see how PVRTune shows how it’s performing on the IMG BXM GPU.

Most of all though, we’re looking forward to interacting with the great developer community and hearing about their needs first-hand so we can continue to produce the best graphics IP possible so you can do your best work. So make sure you come to see us at GDC this year at booth S744!