Are you aware of Unity? The chances are bleak if you are not a gaming freak. Unity is a cross-platform game engine found on gaming consoles. Many Android games—such as Crossy Road, Monument Valley, Lara Croft: Relic Run, and more enjoy its power. Now it has announced Vulken Renderer preview that will allow developers to use its API.
Wikipedia says: Vulkan is a low-overhead, cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API first announced at GDC 2015 by the Khronos Group. The Vulkan API was initially referred to as the “next generation OpenGL initiative,” or “OpenGL next.
The Vulkan API has gained prominence recently in the gaming industry only recently. It is based on AMD’s Mantle API having highly improved graphical user interface for cross-platform along with low overhead. It’s desktop performance is far superior to Microsoft’s DirectX 12 API.
But why it matters for Android. It matters because of its high level of performance which is better than the OpenGL ES API of 3D Android games use. Unity’s blog has reported more than 35 % improvement in frame time over OpenGL ES 3.1 despite both were running on a single thread.
Though it is in experimental stage and it’s tested on Samsung Galaxy S7 model, Nvidia Shield tablet. This will developers to optionally enable Vulkan support in their Android games with Unity settings. Though it will take time to gain stability, but it’s certainly a great start.
Vulkan graphics have become extremely popular in the gaming industry in a short period as they are next gen graphics API and also offer a better GPU control while keeping other standard factors intact . Unlike others, it is not locked to a single OS or device form factor which helps it stands out from competitors. It runs on Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, Tizen, Linux, and Android and offers reduced driver overhead and less CPU workload. So that addition capacity can be deployed in extra computation. All of this makes this is a great news for Android game developers. Do you feel the same?
