Gaming smartphones have become quite popular and now have their own small but growing category. The gaming smartphone category can be classified into two. There are the flagships such as the ASUS ROG II, Black Shark 2 Pro, Nubia Red Magic 3S and Razer Phone 2. There are also mid-range gaming smartphones such as the Redmi Note 8 Pro.
There will be more gaming phones as time goes on and Google wants to make sure that these devices are powerful enough and “behave in a predictable way” for game developers. Hence the development of a Game Device Certification program.
The guys at XDA-Developers were able to get a copy of the latest version of Google’s GMS (Google Mobile Suites) Requirements for OEMs and ODMs which lists the requirements smartphone manufacturers must meet before being allowed to install GMS on their devices. It was discovered that the document now has a new section titled “Gaming Device Certification”.
The document rivals that for a device to have the Gaming Device Certification then it must meet a number of requirements. Below are some of the requirements:
- Predictable Performance: Devices that are certified need to behave in a predictable way so that developers don’t face occurrences such as throttling, loss of CPU cores, and other unusual system behaviors.
- Correct and high-performance GPU behavior: Certified devices are required to have modern and up to date high-performance GPUs and display APIs and enable reasonable frame introspection.
- Memory behavior and requirements: Certified devices must provide access to memory in a predictable way. Games should be able to allocate reasonable amounts of memory and not have their processes unexpectedly killed. Certified Devices must allow a minimum of 2300MB of memory to be allocated before the lowmemorykilller kills the process.
- Also, the device must support Vulkan 1.1 and pass the newest version of dEQP.
Google seems to have already set up a team that will handle this judging by a job listing a few months ago for a Developer Relations Manager for Android Game Device Certification.
The job responsibilities listed include the hiring and managing of the game device certification team, working closely with Android Certification teams, working closely with OEMs and SOC Vendors to drive standardization and define requirements, and working closely with game developers to understand their needs and create tests that validate the requirements.
There is no device at the moment that has received the Game Device Certification since Google has not even officially unveiled the program. It is believed that when Google eventually does announce it, it will also release a continually updated list of certified devices just like it does for Android Enterprise Recommended devices.
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(Source)
