[GDC 2012] ARM showing off some muscle with their Mali chip

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Published on Tuesday, 13 March 2012 13:45

Back in the beginning of GDC 2012 last week, we mentioned that ARM was on site showing off some games and demos featuring their new Mali chip. We later met back up with ARM to talk about the Mali chip and try out some of the demos while figuring out which ones would actually be released as games.

We did film our hands-on with each and every demo ARM had running but in order to not stuff 6 videos into one article, we will not be posting all of them here. However, you can jump over to our YouTube channel which has all of the ARM demo hands-on videos we took for your viewing pleasure.

With that said, we took a look at what ARM was showing off and we have to say it looked quite impressive. The Mali chip seems to do an excellent job when it comes to rendering 3D visuals, even really detailed ones as you will see in the video below of the Havok demo. Havok, with their demo named Fantasy, was an interactive demo showcasing a new engine they are working on specifically for mobile game development.

SiXiTS had both ROBOTA: Vengeance and EON Sky on display running as tech demos. ROBOTA: Vengeance was their title that was up on Kickstarter looking for crowdfunding and features Academy Award Winner Doug Chiang working on it. EON Sky is their other game which will be coming to Android soon which we do not know a whole lot about aside from the fact it was built with Unity3D and looks insanely great visually.

Another title that will actually be making its way to Android as a full game that was available as a playable tech demo was Aztec by Outracks Technologies. This is an FPS game set in the future, sort of a cross between Halo and the movie Avatar. This tech demo also featured some impressive visuals.

Out of all the demos ARM was showcasing, three are going to be coming to Android as full games (Eon Sky, ROBOTA and Aztec), with the fourth title already available called Vendetta Online. We also saw and played with a tech demo from Geometrics that deals with lighting and dynamic lighting changes which, if you head over to our YouTube channel, you will see looks pretty amazing. No word on when the games will be release or when the new Havok engine will be available. We did confirm that the great racing game we talked about, which we also tried out at GDC, called Timbuktu is not going to be released as a game.

Overall though ARM came out strong this year at GDC showing just what their Mali chip can do when it comes to graphically intensive games. While the Mali chip is still relatively new in terms of appearing in Android devices, they already have a newer model getting ready to make its way into Android devices this year which will have even better performance than what we saw at GDC.

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