Google Releases Android 10 With "Vulkan Everywhere", Privacy Improvements

[nanonyme]

Now if only Trump would cease so everyone could have this.

[Terrablit]

Life moves on!
Seriously Vulkan had to happen sometime and frankly 1.1 is a good point to focus on. Beside that old hardware you are talking about will come up short in other ways. By the time phones using this release are shipping and in volume (2020?) there will be plenty of support.

I'd agree, except that the chipset in these phones were new three years ago. They were released about the same time as the Vulkan 1.0 API. And they're not bad phones if you're not playing demanding games. Lack of OS support for a three-year-old device is the kind of vendor shenanigans that built a lot of traction for FOSS in the first place. Devices that are still selling should get at least one major OS upgrade. Otherwise it's massive e-waste. And *Google* still sells these devices for use on Google Fi.

I think Vulkan 1.1 and the new Android release have great features, for sure. I just hope the GPU vendors can do the extra work to shim in the Vulkan 1.1 features. Most of them don't appear to need anything new as far as hardware goes to bump up to 1.1. I just don't think the vendors will care enough to do the work.

[smitty3268]

Scores “well” doesn’t mean a lot. One would have to ask about the power draw and frame rate.

I could be wrong, but Android supporting AV1 likely doesn't mean it will actually always provide a way to decode AV1, just that it provides the ability for future hardware to potentially expose AV1 decode abilities.

In practice, even if phones could software decode AV1 now it would be a horrible user experience because it would burn through your battery too fast.

[phoenk]

The way I understand it, not even AOSP is private, which I think is just terrible. I think it's worthy of a supreme court ruling to order google to let some other organization manage AOSP that Google would then have to use as upstream by court order. They could modify it as they see fit as they do anyway, but at least upstream would be sane.

Who would sue? On what grounds? The supreme court generally doesn't handle cases unless it is a matter of constitutionality, and I fail to see how a private company making a product that many people pay money to use is a constitutional violation.

You might be able to tackle aspects of Google's empire as a monopoly case, but that's entirely different, and not something that the supreme court would be interested in hearing, unless they needed to redefine what a monopoly is.

[wizard69]

Life moves on!

Seriously Vulkan had to happen sometime and frankly 1.1 is a good point to focus on. Beside that old hardware you are talking about will come up short in other ways. By the time phones using this release are shipping and in volume (2020?) there will be plenty of support.

I'm pretty excited for Vulkan 1.1 being a requirement as a developer, but realistically speaking that's going to leave a lot of current low-to-mid-range hardware without support. Qualcomm's Adreno series is a good example. All of the 5xx series advertises Vulkan 1.0 / OpenGL ES 3.2. The 6xx series advertises Vulkan 1.1, but most of the other standards have stayed the same. 6xx series GPUs started being released around the end of 2016.

I *think* there's a good chance that the 5xx hardware could support Vulkan 1.1, but who knows if Qualcomm will bother to update the drivers. Which is a shame, as there's hardware still being sold now with those GPUs.

[wizard69]

yes, av1 decodes well on existing chips and will get better with more neon optimisations.

Scores “well” doesn’t mean a lot. One would have to ask about the power draw and frame rate.

[Terrablit]

I'm pretty excited for Vulkan 1.1 being a requirement as a developer, but realistically speaking that's going to leave a lot of current low-to-mid-range hardware without support. Qualcomm's Adreno series is a good example. All of the 5xx series advertises Vulkan 1.0 / OpenGL ES 3.2. The 6xx series advertises Vulkan 1.1, but most of the other standards have stayed the same. 6xx series GPUs started being released around the end of 2016.

I *think* there's a good chance that the 5xx hardware could support Vulkan 1.1, but who knows if Qualcomm will bother to update the drivers. Which is a shame, as there's hardware still being sold now with those GPUs.

[Templar82]

The new privacy controls will still be great for things like LineageOS that can be ran without google apps.

[tildearrow]

"you, and Google (technically everyone that Google can charge a buck for exposing your private information)"

Fixed it for you. Google is good at one thing - turning private, personal information into the largest advertising fortune in world history.

Yes, I know. Exactly what I meant.

[andyprough]

also you should remove "Privacy" from the title because Google is anything but privacy. True privacy means only you, and nobody else. But to Google it means "you, and Google (technically everyone)".

"you, and Google (technically everyone that Google can charge a buck for exposing your private information)"

Fixed it for you. Google is good at one thing - turning private, personal information into the largest advertising fortune in world history.