Tuesday, August 11th 2015
Google Chooses Vulkan as the 3D Graphics API for Android
Google announced that it chose Vulkan, the next-generation, cross-platform 3D graphics API from Khronos, the people behind OpenGL; as the default API for upcoming versions of its Android operating-system. It currently uses OpenGL ES. GL-ES is widely supported across several embedded platforms, with its most recent update, GL ES 3.2, being released as recently as last week. What makes Khronos particularly interesting is that it's heavily based on AMD Mantle, a low-overhead API that proved its chops against DirectX 11 on the PC platform, before being withdrawn by AMD, in favor of DirectX 12.
Google will be helping developers through the transition between OpenGL ES and Vulkan using a suite of documentation, SDKs rich in compatibility test suits, and more. Vulkan's march to the PC could be a lot less straightforward. It's still being seen as rebranded Mantle, and while AMD announced support for all its Graphics CoreNext GPUs, there's no such announcement from NVIDIA. It could see good adoption with Apple's Mac OS, and desktop *nix. Vulkan could see a lot of popularity with game consoles other than Microsoft Xbox. Sony PlayStation 4, and Nintendo's upcoming console, which use AMD GCN GPUs, could take advantage of Vulkan, due to its lower CPU overhead and close-to-metal optimizations, compared to OpenGL.
Sources:
Android Blog, Many Thanks to Okidna for the tip.
Google will be helping developers through the transition between OpenGL ES and Vulkan using a suite of documentation, SDKs rich in compatibility test suits, and more. Vulkan's march to the PC could be a lot less straightforward. It's still being seen as rebranded Mantle, and while AMD announced support for all its Graphics CoreNext GPUs, there's no such announcement from NVIDIA. It could see good adoption with Apple's Mac OS, and desktop *nix. Vulkan could see a lot of popularity with game consoles other than Microsoft Xbox. Sony PlayStation 4, and Nintendo's upcoming console, which use AMD GCN GPUs, could take advantage of Vulkan, due to its lower CPU overhead and close-to-metal optimizations, compared to OpenGL.
33 Comments on Google Chooses Vulkan as the 3D Graphics API for Android
Live long and Prosper
Anyway, good news. Finally low level APIs everywhere.
I remember BeOS running on my PowerMac PPC and opening 30 QT movies at once and had them all play while still being able to listen to an MP3 and surf the net on Netscape! Pretty impressive when the best M$ had was Windows 95, and we all know what a joke that OS was (in comparison).
:toast:
There's also always linux.
The fact that Android hasn't yet come to desktop (I was expecting Nvidia to be the driving force behind that, but I guess they don't want to jeopardize GTX sales), doesn't mean that it is not a big threat to Microsoft. Because Android today is the only OS that enjoys Windows's BIGGEST advantage. What advantage? Well, not it's features or it's innovation. Many will laugh at that phrase to be honest. The biggest advantage of Windows is that people are used to it, and Android is a threat to Windows, because people are also used to it. People use it every day, probably there are people who use it more hours daily than Windows. Also it doesn't have the biggest disadvantage of Linux with it's gazillion of distributions. You have only one Android, backed up by a big corporation that doesn't let 5000000 people with 5000000 great ideas to mess up with it and create something that it can not be supported easily from hardware manufacturers.
Microsoft knows that Android is a threat. That's why they tried to respond with Windows 8 and Metro UI. But Balmer got it the other way arround. He rushed accepting defeat for the desktop, instead of doing the opposite. Upgrading the desktop and trying to bring Windows experience on smartphones and tablets. That's what Microsoft is doing now.
Thankfully for them, Google tries to push ChromeOS to desktop to sell online services and that gave them time. But if we see Android moving to desktop, things will turn ugly for Microsoft. Have you tried using Android with a keyboard and mouse? Extremely easy. Add to that Vulkan and things could turn ugly for Microsoft in the near future.
An old one from March
and a new one
Now think of a 10+ cores Mediatek SoC at 3GHz and a good GPU. Put those in a small NUC type box. Or maybe an Intel i3/i5/i7 system with an AMD GCN based GPU in a typical mini PC case, running Android. Can it run Crysis? Probably yes.