GCDC’08: adopt your games for the laptop platform

By Michael J Huelskoetter (90 posts) on August 19, 2008 at 4:02 am

This morning at GCDC’08 we attended the tech session of Steve Hughes and Basher Khan presenting the laptop as a gaming platform. As we already reported last week there are lot of things which you have to take into account developing a game for notebooks. That‘s exactly what Steve and Basher talked about.

Interesting thing to know is that there is one laptop being sold every four seconds. That‘s the reason why mobile integrated graphics are really ramping up and are much stronger than mobile discrete adapters. In summary the laptop market represents about 40 percent of the whole PC market –and increasing.

Although the developers should know these figures still a large percentage of PC games are not laptop friendly. So the community has to create more games for notebooks. In order to achieve this Basher had a few tips for the attendees: Developers should use mainly batch primitives, pure DC devices and smaller textures/shaders as these perform better on integrated graphics. But it‘s also necessary to reduce state changes, to choose static over dynamic geometry and to reduce oder eliminate GPU queries as often as possible.

Referring to Basher‘s advice optimizing the DirectX, Vertex/Primitives and shaders rendering code also helps to create gaming titles which run better on Intel Integrated Graphics.

BTW: Did you know that several gaming titles like Age of Empires III and F.E.A.R. run quite well on Intel Integrated Graphics!

Then Steve jumped on stage and covered the Intel Laptop Gaming TDK which we already talked about. Interesting thing about this TDK is its ease of implementation into gaming projects as it‘s a set of APIs that can be integrated with minimal or no overhead.

When the TDK being integrated into gaming code it will for instance provide a battery meter and a wifi signal strength indicator during the game play so that you are always informed about the status of your laptop. There are two ways to use the TDK‘s features: via a polling interface or via a callback interface which is a little bit more complicated to be implemented, but which performs better as it notifies i.e. power source or network connection changes.

After his session Steve was available for a short interview. During this chat we learned what his whole session was about how developers use Intel Integrated Graphics best, how the Laptop Gaming TDK helps the community and what the main advantages of Intel Integrated Graphics of the 4th generation are.

Categories: Events, Game Development, Graphics & Media, Mobility
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For more complete information about compiler optimizations, see our Optimization Notice.

Comments (1)

March 24, 2010 10:02 AM PDT

kerensa-kimberley
kerensa-kimberleyTotal Points:
15
Registered User
 How can I get in touch with steve hughes directly?

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