Posted by Dohyun Kim, Developer Relations Engineer, Android Video games

Discovering the stability between graphics high quality and efficiency

Ares: Rise of Guardians is a mobile-to-PC sci-fi MMORPG developed by Second Dive, a sport studio primarily based in Korea identified for its experience in growing motion RPG sequence and revealed by Kakao Video games. Set in an unlimited universe with an in depth, futuristic background, Ares is stuffed with thrilling gameplay and superbly rendered characters involving combatants carrying battle fits. Nevertheless, due to these richly detailed graphics, some customers’ units struggled to deal with the gameplay with out affecting the efficiency.

For some customers, their gadget would overheat after just some minutes of gameplay and enter a thermally throttled state. On this state, the CPU and GPU frequency are decreased, affecting the sport’s efficiency and inflicting the FPS to drop. Nevertheless, as quickly because the decreased FPS improved the thermal scenario, the FPS would enhance once more and the cycle would repeat. This FPS fluctuation would trigger the sport to really feel janky.

Alter the efficiency in actual time with Android Adaptability

To unravel this downside, Kakao Video games used Android Adaptability and Unity Adaptive Efficiency to enhance the efficiency and thermal administration of their sport.

Android Adaptability is a set of instruments and libraries to grasp and reply to altering efficiency, thermal, and consumer conditions in actual time. These embrace the Android Dynamic Efficiency Framework’s thermal APIs, which offer details about the thermal state of a tool, and the PerformanceHint API, which assist Android select the optimum CPU working level and core placement. Each APIs work with the Unity Adaptive Efficiency bundle to assist builders optimize their video games.

Android Adaptability and Unity Adaptive Efficiency work collectively to regulate the graphics settings of your app or sport to match the capabilities of the consumer’s gadget. Consequently, it could enhance efficiency, scale back thermal throttling and energy consumption, and protect battery life.

Outcomes

After integrating adaptive efficiency, Ares was higher in a position to handle its thermal scenario, which resulted in much less throttling. Consequently, customers have been in a position to take pleasure in the next body fee, and FPS stability elevated from 75% to 96%.

Within the charts beneath, the blue line signifies the thermal warning degree. The underside line (0.7) signifies no warning, the midline (0.8) is throttling imminent, and the higher line (0.9) is throttling. As you may see within the first chart, earlier than implementing Android Adaptability, throttling occurred after about 16 minutes of gameplay. Within the second chart, you may see that after integration, throttling didn’t happen till round 22 minutes.

Kakao Video games additionally needed to cut back gadget heating, which they knew wasn’t doable with a repeatedly excessive graphic high quality setting. The very best follow is to progressively decrease the graphical constancy as gadget temperature will increase to keep up a continuing framerate and thermal equilibrium. So Kakao Video games created a six-step change sequence with Android Adaptability, providing secure FPS and decrease gadget temperatures. Computerized adjustments in constancy are mirrored within the in-game graphic high quality settings (decision, texture, shadow, impact, and so on.) within the settings menu. As a result of some customers need the very best graphic high quality even when their gadget can’t maintain efficiency at that degree, Kakao Video games gave them the choice to manually disable Unity Adaptive Efficiency.

Get began with Android Adaptability

Android Adaptability and Unity Adaptive Efficiency is now obtainable to all Android sport builders utilizing the Android supplier on most Android units after API degree 30 (thermal) and 31 (efficiency Trace API). Builders are in a position to make use of the Android supplier from the Adaptive Efficiency 5.0.0 model. The thermal APIs are built-in with Adaptive Efficiency to assist builders simply retrieve gadget thermal data and the efficiency Trace API is named each Replace() mechanically with none further work.

Learn the way Android Adaptability and Unity Adaptive Efficiency might help you stabilize your sport’s FPS and scale back thermal throttling.