Mobile World Congress 2016 has started and Samsung held their usual Unpacked event that they do each year, but this time the company’s focuses was a lot on mobile gaming. during their event, Samsung ran a tech demo which was to show off Unreal Engine 4 running with the new Vulkan platform.
If you’re not familiar with what Vulkan is, and missed our previous coverage on it, this is a new platform of APIs and tools that Google has officially adopted for low-overhead graphics. The entire platform is designed to give developers a lot more customization and flexibility when it comes to game development on Android. This is supposed to improve performance by providing developers more direct access to the GPU itself, and allowing them to manage memory and multiple threads on their own instead of leaving it up to the driver. It’s open source and can be used with any existing game engine, or developers can build their own engines and tools using these APIs. Lower overheard, higher frame rate equals more quality, better and smoother rendering, with less resources.
Take all of that and use it with something like Unity3D or Unreal Engine 4, and you have some really nice possibilities available. This is what Samsung was essentially getting at during their event and tech demo. We have seen plenty of tech demos showcasing cool eye candy like this in the past, and sometimes we end up having some great games coming out of it.
It’ll be interesting to see what developers do with this sort of power that actually will use less resources. Hopefully we see some great games in the near future using this technology.
