Android Q's ANGLE Offering OpenGL ES On Top Of Vulkan 1.1

With the Google I/O conference happening this week, Android Q Beta 3 was released and it continues furthering along the company's Vulkan adoption.

As outlined back in March, Google has been working to make Vulkan a requirement for all Android Q 64-bit devices and those plans are indeed panning out -- and around Vulkan 1.1 rather than the older 1.0 specifications. For any 32-bit Android devices, Vulkan support will still be treated as optional but the vendors are encouraged to provide support for this high-performance graphics/compute API.

Also exciting is Google's ANGLE project maturing for offering OpenGL ES on top of Vulkan. With Android Q, vendors can optionally use ANGLE in place of any hardware OpenGL ES driver for offering a standard, vendor-independent GLES implementation that runs atop the Vulkan hardware driver.

Users on Android Q under the developer options will be able to select between ANGLE and native OpenGL driver support where available. More details on ANGLE via the documentation.

More details on the changes to find with Android Q Beta 3 can be found from today's blog post.