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based on AMD Mantle, a low-overhead API that proved its chops against DirectX 11 on the PC platform, before being withdrawn by AMD, in favor of DirectX 12.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
They completely ignore all the negative feedback and instead get angry because of it and unleash the next crap. Now more troubles with Windows 10 which is not ready to be released as a final version.
The reasons for it's lack of adoption have more to do with AMD's historically shitty support for it.Off topic.
This morning I installed Windows 7.
Also have a look at what is happening today. It is a different period with different parameters of course, but games do use proprietary techs from Nvidia that make AMD cards look like sh!t, in some cases even older Nvidia cards. So, the game creators doesn't really care that much about performance. Not to mention that for years games where developed on Intel+Nvidia hardware, that's why AMD's drivers where needing a few new versions and patches until most problems get fixed.
But it could be true I suppose. Who knows really? I certainly think the poor OpenGL performance on 50% of your target market in the heyday of things such as Mac OS X being "prettier" than XP did not help.