This year was a debut for SIGGRAPH Mobile – a full day program dedicated to Mobile graphics during SIGGRAPH 2012 conference in Los Angeles. Mobile becoming part of the graphics conference proves that this sector advances by leaps and bounds – both technology and application wise.

Of course such day would be somewhat less without Unity :) I gave talk on graphics related challenges that we face while developing Unity on mobiles. Talk is intended for people who develop their own technology from scratch or those who want to know more about the under-the-hood details of the Unity engine. It will hardly help to optimize your game developed with Unity, but might give insights why things are done in a certain way.

Talk starts with short overview of GPU architectures, then delves into a series of cross-platform problems (usually they are not what you think), discusses some don’ts and dos for mobiles, our optimization techniques, cross-platform shader approach and ends with short overview of automated graphics testing on mobiles.

Slides: Unity: iOS and Android: cross platform challenges and solutions (8.5MB pdf)

There was one interesting thing at SIGGRAPH Mobile, when asked how many people are familiar with Mobiles and are developing for those platforms – almost 90% of audience raised their hands – and that is at predominantly academic, film-production and high-end CG conference! But what surprised me even more, was choice of platform they’re developing for: around 10-15% raised hands for iOS and probably 80% raised for Android!