This week, the Game Developers Conference (GDC 2018) took place in San Francisco, USA, drawing industry professionals and gaming enthusiasts from around the world. In recent years, the mobile gaming sector has gained significant attention at the event, highlighting the growing influence of mobile games in the broader gaming landscape. One of the highlights of this year’s exhibition was the collaboration between Qualcomm and NetEase Games, which introduced the ultra-high-definition (2K) mode "Wild Action" for the first time on a mobile device powered by the Snapdragon 845 platform. This enhanced visual mode was specifically optimized to leverage the hardware capabilities of the Snapdragon 800 series, delivering an immersive and realistic gaming experience.
Thanks to this partnership, devices equipped with the Snapdragon 845 can now run "Wild Action" at high frame rates. It's a groundbreaking achievement, as it supports up to 4K human-computer interaction interfaces, 2K ultra HD scene rendering, HDR display, and real-time shadows and global illumination effects. The result is a perfect balance between performance and power efficiency, allowing players to enjoy a console-like experience on their mobile devices.
In December last year, Qualcomm and NetEase announced a joint effort to optimize the NetEase game engine, Messiah, across the Snapdragon 800 series platforms, including the 845. Earlier collaborations on the Snapdragon 835 platform had already enabled advanced features like physical rendering (PBR), TSAA, depth of field (DOF), and high dynamic range lighting, significantly enhancing the quality of games such as "Wild Wild Save." These optimizations made game characters and objects more lifelike, as demonstrated through videos shared publicly.
At GDC 2018, this collaboration showcased the latest advancements in mobile gaming technology. NetEase Games is also the exclusive Chinese game content provider for Qualcomm's exhibition. Additionally, both companies have made notable progress in supporting Vulkan graphics and computing APIs, with plans to bring more game content to the Vulkan platform. They are also working on further optimizing upcoming 2018 titles for NetEase games running on the Snapdragon 845.
The growing variety of mobile games has captured the interest of gamers worldwide. Take "Wilderness Action," one of the most popular and successful sandbox survival third-person shooters, with over 100 million users and more than 25 million daily active users. As mobile game content continues to expand and the gaming community grows, the demand for better performance and graphics in mobile devices has also increased.
From a software perspective, NetEase's self-developed game engine, Messiah, is renowned for its multi-threaded parallel execution and support for advanced technologies like physical rendering and dynamic shading. It has been deeply integrated with the Qualcomm Opteron mobile platform, combining hardware and software optimization for superior performance.
On the hardware side, the Snapdragon 845 introduces a new image and visual processing architecture, reducing power consumption by up to 30% in gaming applications compared to previous generations. The Adreno 630 GPU improves both performance and energy efficiency by up to 30%. The Kryo 385 CPU architecture delivers up to 25% faster performance in game loading and heavy tasks. With heterogeneous computing, the Snapdragon 845 enhances user experience while boosting performance and battery life. Its combination of speed, smoothness, long-lasting battery, and cool operation makes it ideal for flagship smartphones in 2018.
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