Graham Mudd / Head, Visual Computing, SRUK

In recent years, mobile gaming has exploded in popularity as more people enjoy the increasing power, battery life and affordability of the latest generation of smartphone devices.

Galaxy smartphones make up the world's largest mobile gaming platform. A number of major game engine producers and game publishers are already closely collaborating with Samsung to ensure that our users continue to enjoy the best possible gaming experience on our platforms.
Since we announced the Galaxy GameDev program at Samsung Developer Conference 2016, Samsung has worked hard to extend our support beyond the major companies to encompass all developers creating games for Galaxy devices.

To create the best-performing games and meet the challenging deadlines of the games industry, game developers need good tools. One of the most important software tools in recent years is RenderDoc, which is a graphics debugger that allows a developer to take a detailed look inside the application being developed. With the power of this tool it is possible to diagnose many kinds of rendering problems quickly and efficiently. RenderDoc is fully open source (under an MIT licence), so there are no barriers to entry for even the smallest game studio or independent developer and all the source code is freely available for anyone to fix issues or add features.
 

1A screen shot of RenderDoc in action on a Samsung Galaxy mobile device

In the spirit of open cooperation, Samsung Research UK (SRUK) and its partners have been prolific contributors to the RenderDoc project since 2017 and we have been responsible for adding support for the Android operating system, together with Vulkan API support for Android and OpenGL ES API support for Linux and Android targets. With these developments we have made an already powerful tool relevant to a whole new ecosystem of software developers.

This year, SRUK has contributed a new feature in RenderDoc that will enable access to hardware performance counters in some of our devices. Performance counters enable very fine-grained analysis of the hardware utilisation in the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) of the device. Performance counters have been used by developers on desktop class machines for some time but our new development makes this feature freely available to developers on mobile platforms for the first time. Initially we are supporting the OpenGL ES API, but we will add support for Vulkan in the near future.

2RenderDoc showing the new Performance Counter feature in action

Thanks to these contributions from Samsung, we hope that mobile developers will have access to the same level of powerful debugging and performance analysis techniques that are commonly used on higher power desktop class machines. We will be adding lots more support for RenderDoc and other tools, and we will continue our efforts to work closely with developers and use their feedback to continually improve our products.

If you are interested in finding out more about RenderDoc or other aspects of Samsung’s mobile game support ecosystem, please visit the Galaxy GameDev section of the Samsung Developers website.

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OpenGL and Vulkan are registered trademarks of the Khronos group