Qualcomm and NetEase announce collaboration to support optimization of NetEase games on Snapdragon 845 flagship mobile platform

Dec 7, 2017 | HAWAII

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM), and NetEase Games, a division of NetEase, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTES), today announced that the companies plan to work together to optimize NetEase’s game engine, Messiah, on Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 800 series flagship mobile platforms, including the newly announced Snapdragon 845 Mobile Platform. This will help create next generation gaming content for premium mobile and eXtended Reality (XR) games and explore the future of new immersive mobile gaming experience.

“We are excited to work with a leading, global gaming content provider like NetEase Games,” said Sanjay Mehta, senior vice president, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and president, QCT China. “By working together, we aim to utilize the cutting-edge multimedia and VR/AR processing advantages of the Snapdragon 845 Mobile Platform, allowing players around the globe to enjoy the immersive mobile gaming experiences with higher quality.”

“With our close relationship with Qualcomm Technologies, NetEase can improve our existing and future mobile gaming content more effectively for premium tier Snapdragon platforms, especially the Snapdragon 845 Mobile Platform,” said Ethan (Yi) Wang, vice president, NetEase, Inc. “We will develop and optimize more exceptional mobile gaming products for players around the globe, continuing to meet their demands for premium gaming experience.”

The increasing complexity of next generation mobile games, including VR/AR applications brings even greater challenges to the performance and power consumption of mobile devices. Benefitting from heterogeneous computing capabilities, Snapdragon 845 is engineered to provide robust performance and extremely low power consumption. Currently, the two companies have each made great progress in support of Khronos’ Vulkan™ graphics and compute API. As the next-generation efficient graphic and compute API, Vulkan can better offload tasks from the CPU, enabling developers to make use of the performance of the Qualcomm® Adreno™ GPU on the Snapdragon mobile platform. Vulkan’s compatibility with multiple-platforms eases resource constraints for both PC and mobile game developers. Messiah, NetEase’s in-house game engine, known for its multi-thread parallel execution that empowers advanced technologies such as physical based rendering and dynamic shadowing, is being optimized for the Snapdragon mobile platform, aiming to bring more Vulkan-enabled gaming contents to players.

Additionally, the two companies are working together to collaborate on XR technology. Using Snapdragon VR Software Development Kit, Twilight Pioneers, NetEase’s first premium VR game supporting Six Degrees of Freedom (6 DoF), has been successfully ported to Snapdragon. NetEase's self-developed AR platform, InsightAR, aims to support easy-to-use development tools for content developers and bring high quality AR experiences to end users using Snapdragon Mobile Platform.

OEM relationships are also vital for the two companies vision to bring deeply optimized mobile gaming experiences to devices, and both companies are also working with leading devices providers. For example, during the recent launch of the OnePlus’s 5T, which is powered by Snapdragon 835, NetEase showed a demo of its latest hit mobile game title, “Knives Out”. The survival sandbox TPS game can run high resolution mode and offer a great user experience on OnePlus 5T. This is made possible using the execution power of Messiah engine on Snapdragon mobile platform, making the in-game experience stable and smooth while offering sharp graphic details.

The two companies plan to work together to optimize the Snapdragon 845 Mobile Platform for several NetEase games to be launched in 2018.