Imagination Tech Is Demoing Vulkan On Android

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Imagination Tech Is Demoing Vulakn On Android

In continuation of this morning's article about the Khronos announcements, Khronos Debuts OpenGL ES 3.2 and New GL Extensions, But No Vulkan This Week, Imagination Tech is talking about their new Vulkan on Android demo...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=IMG-Vulkan-Android-Demo

[Ancurio]

The low CPU usage is amazing. Of course, this is a demo that heavily favors Vulkan's ability to generate and retain command buffers on the fly, spread over multiple threads. It's the ideal scenario to make Vulkan look good and OpenGL ES inferior.

[boffo]

Very nice.

[Pecisk]

Btw, Ars Technica reports that Android will move to Vulkan as default graphics API

[birdie]

When comparing different APIs you always have to remember that you can create highly inefficient code paths which will show that one API is superior over the other. Like this very demo.

Please note that this is an exaggerated scenario that is intended to highlight and amplify Vulkan?s strengths. It is not intended to show OpenGL ES in a bad light ? we are deliberately using OpenGL ES in a way that it was not designed for. We are also aiming to be GPU bound using the Vulkan API; this means the GPU and CPU are being used as effectively as possible, which is a great thing for developers and vendors alike.

Actually there're proving me right.

[kyotofu]

Yes, the demo is slightly unrealistic, I would say that for the same amount of engineering time they are equivalent. You could spend a lot of time reducing the CPU usage in the OpenGL ES version. However it would require profiling and there would be a lot of hacks. With vulkan you know where the work is going to happen.

But the parallelisation and re-use is something that OpenGL ES cannot do.

[blackout23]

Of course demos like Star Swarm for Mantle were designed to really show where the new API shines, but how is that unrealistic? If you want to have a game where there are 10000 units on the screen it's just not possible with older APIs and tech demos show just that.

[chithanh]

I too read it as: We can now do things with Vulkan which weren't possible with OpenGL ES due to API limitations.
Not: We deliberately cripple our demo on OpenGL ES to make it look worse vs. Vulkan.

And a low-overhead API has consequences not limited to tech demos. BF4 is possible on iPads now thanks to Metal. http://www.frostbite.com/2014/11/fro...ield-4-on-ios/

[Min1123]

I really hope Valve and their partners are keeping that Intel Vulkan driver up-to-date. I also hope for other Vulkan FOSS drivers quickly, possibly based off of that work. I can only understand it not being released by them changing and fleshing out the spec, so I'm trying to be patient.

Thing is, it's tough not to notice that all the hardware manufacturers and game developers have access to play with this stuff, but it's on lockdown for everyone else.

[chithanh]

A user on NeoGAF just posted this tweet: