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New advice for more efficient games on Android

ARM breaks down its tools for developers to make their Android titles perform even better

New advice for more efficient games on Android

Leading mobile platform architect, Arm, has released new advice for developers looking to optimize mobile games for best performance on Android. A newly published range of game performance blogs and videos deal with some of the common problems and most likely culprits of slow running applications and devices overheating.

The advice supports the use of Arm Mobile Studio, a free-to-use tools suite from Arm which launched at GDC, San Francisco in March 2019. The Studio has grown from offering an application profiler (Streamline) and debugger (Graphics Analyzer) when first introduced, to including the Mali Offline Compiler from November 2019. Most recently, Arm has added its latest game optimization tool, Performance Advisor, for data analysis and report generation, launched in February this year.

Arm’s new documentation guides developers across the entire suite of tools and highlights the importance of having a whole system understanding of game performance. Developers can see new videos showing exactly how to access key data when using Performance Advisor for tackling performance analysis and learn how to capture a performance profile with Streamline.

Tier-one game development studios can also discover how Performance Advisor can eventually be used within a continuous integration–based game development workflow in a blog which details the process for automated analysis.

The right tools for the job

"In most instances poor application performance can be tracked down to either being bound by the processing capacity of the CPU, or by the vertex or fragment processing capacity of the GPU," said Peter Harris, Technical Director for Arm Mobile Studio.

"You can use a tool like Performance Advisor to find out exactly where the issue lies, and then use other tools in the Studio to investigate the problem in more detail. We've designed the tools and documentation to help mobile game developers eliminate inefficiency by avoiding redundant work or optimizing workloads to reduce their processing cost."

Harris continued: "The next steps for Arm Mobile Studio are to work closely with the developer community to find out what more we can do to make the optimization experience easier.

"We're planning to launch the professional solution at the middle of this year. This will allow Arm Mobile Studio users to run automated analysis in continuous integration, and export dashboard-friendly JSON analysis results to report and slice the data however they like."

For further information on running games efficiently on Android you can visit the Arm Mobile Studio optimization advice page.


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