Unity 3D Ported to OpenGL ES on ARM

By , Published November 22, 2011

The Ubuntu Developer Summit held earlier this month in Florida, US, was home to a wealth of discussion, demo and debate on all manners Ubuntu.

Part of that extended to Linaro – the ARM-orientated software engineering company of which Canonical are a driving member – who showed off a port of Unity 3D running on an ARM Cortex-A9 Pandaboard using OpenGL ES - a “..subset of the OpenGL 3D graphics API designed for embedded systems such as mobile phones, PDAs, and video game consoles.” 

Unity 2D is already supported on a variety of ARM devices.

The whole ‘Unity on ARM’ project is exciting for some many reasons, not least of which is the notion of a low-cost, low-power ARM-based computer the size of a USB stick capable of running a full Unity 3D desktop experience.

A full desktop experience on an ARM device – something Microsoft can’t offer yet, but Ubuntu is almost able to.

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  • Anonymous

    Hell yeah! Now, I can happily get rid of my Pentium IV with crappy nVidia card for ARM!

    • seamus williams

      LOL my pentium 4 died the other-day it exploded and my net-book melted so i got a second hand HP with a dual core celeron, but I miss my Pentium 4′s temperamental performance 

      • Anonymous

        Wow, an exploding Pentium!

        To hell with temperamental performance – I like Unity (3D), and it does not play nice with it. Granted it’s the video card’s issue, but it’s just too old.

        Not the mention the borked fan control means it’s running at full speed all the time. You can’t imagine how noisy it is.

        • seamus williams

          Mine was a Dell optiplex and when 11:04 was on it was fine then wwhen 11:10 was installed it when mental 3d ran fine with the onboard graphics but. 

          the fan and PSU blew up my room stank of crayons for days 

          • Anonymous

            My one is a custom build, nothing fancy, just to save a few bucks. No onboard graphics, unfortunately. nVidia FX 5500, blacklisted, but forcing it worked fine in Natty (except the icons in launcher wouldn’t show). On 11.10, however, I can’t even get it to run properly.

            Maybe OpenGL ES can help, but I ain’t crossing my fingers – I would love to get rid of it.

  • http://twitter.com/ux92 uvazquez

    Is this Unity the graphics engine or Unity the desktop? I always get confused.

    • http://twitter.com/ux92 uvazquez

      Yeah, I got 2 likes and no answer :’(

      • Lee Fry

        This would be the desktop.

        • http://twitter.com/ux92 uvazquez

          Thank you! Now, after having eating and fully woken up I could understand it.

    • http://profiles.google.com/lain.halfbit Lain inVerse

      Have you tried to read the article before asking this question? Seriously.

      • http://twitter.com/ux92 uvazquez

        Yes, but still couldn’t get which one it was being half asleep and hungry :P

        • http://twitter.com/tom_ankcorn Tom Ankcorn

          the graphics engine for unity 3d is compiz.
          im not to sure how they have done this but i suspect they have ported the parts of compiz that unity needs to arm.

        • http://profiles.google.com/lain.halfbit Lain inVerse

          Go eat and sleep, goddammit! Stop clicking like a zombie. Hope you already did.

    • http://twitter.com/Sephiroth_VII NCLI

      You know, watching the video makes it quite clear, not to mention there are no “2D” and “3D” versions of the Unity engine.

      • http://twitter.com/ux92 uvazquez

        “Unity” engine is called “Unity3D” that’s why I messed up. Couldn’t watch the video, was at work and half asleep :P

        • http://www.mrericsir.com MrEricSir

          Yes, that always trips me up as well.  Unity wasn’t a good choice of names on Ubuntu’s part.

  • Ankit Haldar

    now i ll buy a raspberry pi

  • Anonymous

    Go ubuntu:) the cool thing that any improvements done for ubutu will eventually be in all other distro`s too

  • http://twitter.com/d2kx Dennis MH

    ARM is the future, hands down, so Ubuntu is VERY wise to invest so much in it! Great work!

  • FiLeVeR10

    Seems like the mouse was jumping pretty bad, it might be a while before it’s fully functional…

  • Subhadip Ghosh

    The Microsoft part is the most interesting one! Go Ubuntu Go! Destiny awaits!

    • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_IH4OBL3AGQV2WPP2OGHZRRKG64 Helder

      Correct me if I’m mistaken but Windows 8, due to release next year,  will support the ARM architecture. So, it seems that the ARM support won’t be a trump card for Ubuntu in a near future.  As sad as it may be, Redmond is playing catch-up…

      • Subhadip Ghosh

        Don’t you get it? This time we have reached there first, at least we won’t be behind them which has been the case so far!

        • conor rynne

          hmmm…Tablet interfaces? no Linux got there before MS… Decently fast filesystem? We got there first… Seperate desktop UIs for tablet and desktop?  We have always had that support, and quite frankly linux implements it better (doesn’t force you to run the tablet interface in the background). Flashy Effects? compiz existed a year before Vista was released, and, again, was implemented better (better effects, did not completely kill your computer performance).

          ARM Support? Linux has supported ARM for a very long time now. Even Ubuntu had it’s own officially supported version up until recently

  • https://launchpad.net/~exeleration-g Exeleration-G

    Thumbs up if you also noticed Bilal Akhtar in the video :-)

  • Anonymous

    I spy with my eye… Bilal Akhtar at 2:12 in the video

  • Anonymous

    Forgive me if I am mistaken, but doesn’t a port to OpenGL ES mean it can run with Wayland instead of X.org?

    • Anonymous

      Yes. But they still need to port Compiz to Wayland first.

      • Anonymous

        I guess Wayland will get it’s own compositing manager..

      • Jason Gray

        Watch the video they did already.

        • Anonymous

          ARM hardware doesn’t mean it’s running Wayland.

          • Jason Gray

            I didn’t say it was, I was merely pointing out that to run Unity natively on Wayland it had to be ported to OpenGL ES.

    • Jason Gray

      I’m not sure, but you’re right Wayland does use OpenGL ES instead of OpenGL so it doesn’t have to depend on X. They really seemed to miss the big picture on this one. The port was  necessarily to make Unity run natively on Wayland on x86 harware too.

    • Akshat Jain

      No. Compiz would need to use Wayland instead of X.

  • Anonymous

    Ubuntu Linaro

    I kind of like that name for a product off the self.

    ‘I would like to purchase an Ubuntu Linaro please Mr PC World?’

  • http://www.jusargumentandi.co.cc Jean

    That’s good news!

  • David Art

    Nice ..

    @Ankit Haldar : from RaspberryPi Faq –  ”"”  (Sept 4 2011 – originally, this FAQ suggested that Ubuntu would be supported. Because of issues with newer releases of Ubuntu and the ARM processor we are using, Ubuntu can’t commit to support Raspberry Pi at the moment.) “” 

  • http://www.facebook.com/bartosz.zasieczny Bartosz Zasieczny

    California? I thought that Orlando is in Florida :)

  • Lulz zllz

    Nice to see Novacut was used for the camera/ video recorder.  ^^

    • http://novacut.com Novacut

      It was a lot of work, but we had fun and love to help show the human side of UDS/Linaro Connect.

      BTW, we captured over 700GB of video, audio, and photos, all of which was imported with and stored in dmedia.  And that’s not a typo… gigabytes! :^)

  • Guest

    Watch the video they already did.

  • Anonymous

    offtopic – sorry but anyone can help me?
    i got ubu 11.10, i had  lighdm as default login manager, but now i got as default that one from gnome-shell…how can i back to lightdm login manager from ubuntu unity?

    • http://yourethemannowdog.com Shasta McShasta

      ubuntuforums.org or askubuntu.com are both excellent websites that you can either search for your answer, or start a new thread about it.  They both have helpful and friendly communities, and you’re a lot more likely to get an answer there than posting in a blog’s comment thread.  Good luck!

      • Anonymous

        u r right:)

    • Anonymous
      • Anonymous

        got it before u, but thx!:)

  • satish gupta

    i don’t know why unity trying to go for arm devices i know i can not stop them but this is the dumbest reason they messed with Interface and made unity(DOING WHAT MICROSOFT AND GNOME DUMPED “MENU”) why they think they can beat IOS 5 and Windows 8(I think windows 8 is following same concept as GNOME-SHELL as i mentioned earlier dumping menu concept) why should we go back when we can move forward.

    • http://twitter.com/howythegeek Howy

      You know, there are the people who go for Linux on computers. The same applies to phones, but it’s less spoke of. If you’ve ever heard of the N900, it’s been running Ubuntu with KDE and Gnome for some time. It’s been a proof that you can run it and do something. This new step means we can have pretty and hardware-accelerated environments, which is a step towards an even more user-friendly experience. Did you know that Android existed LONG before it became Google Android? It was under development, but Google brought it to the light of day for users, and you see how that went. If Canonical can manage to impress a couple of OEMs they might get a catch on selling Ubuntu-powered devices in the future. Probably not mainstream, but why would it have to be?

  • Anonymous

    I love the i7s, but I love the ARM architecture, and how it’s shaping up to be a bit more unified than before. If you take away the x86 history books, ARM is quite the contender, much like PowerPC was.

    I still believe in PowerPC (as does SONY), but I love ARM, too. I’m glad that, with Linux, I can get the best of all these processors without needing to worry much about software.

    T^T It’s a magical world we live in.

  • Alvaro Nunez

    Canonical team talk about same topic:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvZWBDJlcv4

 
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