<strong>Powering the future of mobile gaming</strong>

Mobile gaming is a thriving and expanding ecosystem that offers diverse opportunities for gamers, professionals, and businesses.

Mobile gaming is on the rise, creating a vibrant and expanding ecosystem that offers diverse opportunities for gamers, professionals, and businesses alike. To delve into the evolving landscape of mobile gaming, we sat down with Sachin Kalantri, Senior Director, Product Marketing at Qualcomm India Pvt. Ltd.

He sheds light on emerging trends in mobile gaming, the optimization of devices for gaming performance, the impact of gaming on smartphone lifespan and durability, security measures to protect mobile gaming apps, and the importance of data protection. Join us as we explore Qualcomm's efforts to enhance the gaming experience and address the challenges in the dynamic world of mobile gaming.

Emerging Trends in Mobile Gaming and Adaptation

The rise of mobile gaming is driving the demand for better devices and catalysing a larger, richer mobile gaming ecosystem. It is creating diverse opportunities for everyone in the ecosystem – from professional players, casters, influencers, and game designers to event management companies. With increasing capabilities of mobile processors, there is an increasingly wider choice of games that can be played on portable devices. Now, with 5G delivering higher speeds and lower latency, cloud gaming could extend those experiences to the entry devices. Further, advancements in Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), too, are expected to have a huge positive impact on mobile gaming. The use of AR in gaming combines audio and images, helping players interact with the game in a deeper manner than ever before. The integration of on-device AI has the potential to revolutionize the mobile gaming industry, as developers will be encouraged to create more immersive and personalized gaming experiences. The large size of India's population, the increasing penetration of 5G smartphones, and the expanding 5G network coverage are catalyst to creating a lucrative market for mobile gaming.

Optimizing Device Performance for Gaming

At Qualcomm, we focus on delivering premium gaming experiences to users. Qualcomm chipsets are built to deliver exceptional performance while maintaining very high efficiency. Our Snapdragon Elite Gaming platform delivers mobile-first features and enhancements, including advanced customizations, ultra-realistic graphics, lightning connectivity, and performance speeds that transform a mobile phone into a premium gaming machine. The recently launched Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 Mobile Platform delivers superior CPU and GPU performance for fast-paced, non-stop gaming. Bolstered with Snapdragon Elite Gaming features such as Auto Variable Rate Shading (VRS), Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 improves power and performance by rendering content in focus at full resolution, and the background at a lower resolution.

To maximize mobile gaming performance and battery life, we recently introduced the Snapdragon Game Super Resolution (GSR) feature on Snapdragon Elite Gaming Platform – our suite of mobile gaming features. Snapdragon GSR is a single-pass spatial-aware super-resolution technique that achieves optimal super-scaling quality with the best performance and power savings. Furthermore, it improves resolution while maintaining the visual quality of graphics and increases the frame rate for smoother gameplay.

Impact of Gaming on Smartphone Lifespan and Durability

The durability of a smartphone depends, to a considerable extent, on its maintenance and the individual’s usage pattern. Gaming is a graphic-heavy use case that consumes a lot of power. This can become a long-term concern for smartphone users who use their devices for other functions too, and not just gaming. A recent study by Counterpoint and Oppo showed that 72% of India’s smartphone users experience low-battery anxiety.

While battery tech is still an emerging area, smartphone innovation has come a long way. We have always focused on increasing performance without impacting the battery too much. Snapdragon platforms already provide solutions that keep power consumption lower to make the most of the battery capacity.

The newly unveiled Snapdragon 8+ Gen 2 has a Kryo CPU which delivers 35% faster performance and 40% better power efficiency. These improvements are a result of our brand-new micro-architecture, which converts one efficiency core into an additional performance core to reach peak multi-threaded performance, with speeds up to 3.36 GHz. Embedded with the Snapdragon X70 5G Modem-RF system, it is equipped with Qualcomm 5G AI Processor, Qualcomm Smart Transmit and Qualcomm 5G PowerSave for the latest advancements in speed, coverage, and latency, plus range and link robustness to enable champion-level gameplay.

Ensuring Security of Mobile Gaming Apps

The Qualcomm Mobile Security suite, built upon the strength of the Qualcomm Snapdragon security platform, is designed to safeguard the entire device from mobile security threats. The Mobile Security framework is engineered to provide multilevel security by combining a hardware-level solution with next-generation software for robust biometrics security. The newest Mobile Security components include secure camera, secure token, and Qualcomm® Snapdragon Smart Protect for our latest mobile security measures. OEMs and game developers can use these features to improve the overall security of the device. It’s also important for users to use their devices more responsibly.

Protecting User Data in Mobile Gaming Apps

Data protection is a well-recognized security requirement for mobile devices, feature designers and mobile app developers. As mobile devices evolve into the most important personal computing platform, they have become the major producer, consumer, and storage of users’ personal data. The demand to prevent data stored on mobile devices from unauthorized access arises not only from users’ expectations of privacy, but also from legal requirements and the reputation of related technology providers. In addition to user data, sensitive information stored on mobile devices can also be from device manufacturers, app developers, cloud service providers, network carriers, financial institutions and so on. It is of the business interest of the whole mobile ecosystem to provide secure storage on mobile. Designing a secure storage scheme is often challenging and error prone. To help address this issue, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. (QTI) has integrated several hardware-backed secure storage solutions in its mobile SoC products. Each of these solutions are designed with different purposes.

•     Secure File System (SFS)

•     Fast Trusted Storage (FTS)

•     Qualcomm Trusted Execution Environment (TEE)

•     Android Keymaster for cryptographic keys management

Sachin Kalantri, Senior Director, Product Marketing at Qualcomm India Pvt. Ltd.