Posted by Shannon Woods, Technical Program Manager
Today we're pleased to bring you a preview of Android development tools for Vulkan™. Vulkan is a new 3D rendering API which we’ve helped to develop as a member of Khronos, geared at providing explicit, low-overhead GPU (Graphics Processor Unit) control to developers. Vulkan’s reduction of CPU overhead allows some synthetic benchmarks to see as much as 10 times the draw call throughput on a single core as compared to OpenGL ES. Combined with a threading-friendly API design which allows multiple cores to be used in parallel with high efficiency, this offers a significant boost in performance for draw-call heavy applications.
Vulkan support is available now via the Android N Preview on devices which support it, including Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P. (Of course, you will still be able to use OpenGL ES as well!)
To help developers start coding quickly, we’ve put together a set of samples and guides that illustrate how to use Vulkan effectively.
You can see Vulkan in action running on an Android device with Robert Hodgin’s Fish Tornado demo, ported by Google’s Art, Copy, and Code team:
There are many similarities between OpenGL ES and Vulkan, but Vulkan offers new features for developers who need to make every millisecond count.
As noted above, Vulkan’s lack of implicit validation requires developers to make use of tools outside the API in order to validate their code. Vulkan’s layer mechanism allows validation code and other developer tools to inspect every API call during development, without incurring any overhead in the shipping version. Our guides show you how to build the validation layers for use with the Android NDK, giving you the tools necessary to build bug-free Vulkan code from start to finish.
The Vulkan ecosystem is a broad one, and the resources to get you started don’t end here. There is a wealth of material to explore, including:
Platform
Android Studio
Google Play
Android Jetpack
Docs
News
