In an effort to boost its mobile 3D graphics capabilities, Google has acquired 3D graphics firm drawElements. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Arcticstartup is reporting that the sale price was over $10 million.
Launched in 2008, the Helsinki, Finland-based company specializes in analyzing and assessing mobile 3D graphics. Its primary product, called dEQP, is a powerful toolkit used to benchmark the accuracy, feature conformance and stability of openGL ES and OpenCL GPUs.
It enables detailed quality comparisons between different vendors and GPU architectures, as well as providing high-quality tools for analyzing and debugging any issues uncovered by the tests.
"Over the next few months, we’ll be working with our colleagues on the Android team to incorporate some of our technology into the compatibility test suite", the startup said on its website.
For Google, whose Android operating system runs on hardware from different smartphone and tablet manufacturers, each having its own set of GPU parameters, the move seems logical as the company will likely use the newly acquired technology for device standardization and to make sure manufacturer fragmentation is low across devices. The company hasn't yet officially announced the deal.
While the startup's management will reportedly move to the search giant’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, the remaining members of the team will stay in Finland.
DrawElements is one of the smaller acquisitions made by Google so far this year. The company bought thermostat maker Nest Labs for $3.2 billion and satellite company Skybox Imaging for $500 million, among others.
