MobileWars: A mobile GPGPU game

Abstract

Nowadays mobile phones, especially smartphones, are equipped with advanced computing capabilities. Most of these devices have multicore processors such as dual-core CPUs and many-core GPUs. These processors are designed for both low power consumption and high performance computation. Moreover, most devices still lack libraries for generic multicore computing usage, such as CUDA or OpenCL. However, computing certain kind of tasks in these mobile GPUs, and other available multicores processors, may be faster and much more efficient than their single threaded CPU counterparts. This advantage can be used in game development to optimize some aspects of a game loop and also include new features. This work presents an architecture designed to process most of the game loop inside a mobile GPU using the Android Renderscript API. As an illustrated test case for the proposed architecture, this work presents a game prototype called "MobileWars", completely developed using the proposed architecture. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2013.