With the arrival of new form-factors, new input methods, and significant incentives for reduced power consumption, developing games for the PC has changed forever. These changes bring opportunity and challenges for game developers. At the Game Developers Conference in late March Intel Corp. will carry out a session aimed to help game designers to take advantage of ultrabooks as well as human interfaces.

Intel games optimization experts – Andrew Lauritzen, Richard Huddy (ex-Nvidia, ex-AMD) and Leigh Davies – will show game developers how to make their games shine on ultrabook. Over the course of the day Intel will cover improvements of graphics performance (probably on Core i-series "Ivy Bridge" and "Haswell" microprocessors with integrated graphics), help to understand the Windows touch APIs and reduce power consumption of hardware during gaming processes. Most importantly, Intel’s specialists will teach how to integrate gyro, accelerometer, and other sensor inputs into PC games.

“You will learn these skills through a combination of training and hands-on activity with a complete ultrabook lab setup in the room. Throughout the day, you will learn from other game developers who have successfully designed their games for the best possible presentation on the PC, and you will gain insights into how Intel is transforming the PC into the best gaming platform available,” the description of the session reads.

Ultrabooks in particular and mobile devices in general are increasingly important for Intel as the world is adopting them quickly and expects premium experience from hardware  that was designed to be power-efficient on the first place. While previously gaming devices usually utilized high-performance discrete graphics processors, ultrabooks, tablets and convertibles cannot integrate additional graphics chips and therefore video games will have to rely on Intel’s integrated graphics and even run well on such solutions.

Another interesting thing is that Intel is underlining importance of human interfaces for gaming. Besides gyroscopes and accelerometers, which are widely used in tablets, Intel will most likely cover gesture-based and voice control input mechanisms at the video games conference.

Tags: Intel, Haswell, Ivy Bridge, Rockwell, Broadwell