Google has announced that Vulkan is becoming the official graphics API for Android. Ahead of the Game Developers Conference next week, Google has outlined some of its key announcements as well as changes that will supposedly bring better performance and game support to the platform.
Vulkan to Become Android’s “Unified Rendering Stack,” Older Devices to Use ANGLE
Starting with Android 16, Vulkan is reported to serve as the primary GPU hardware abstraction layer for the platform. This builds upon Android 15, which shipped with ANGLE (Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine) as a layer to translate OpenGL ES calls to Vulkan.
Android has long struggled with carving out its place in the high-end gaming market. Despite Vulkan being available on the platform since 2016, it didn’t immediately become the standard due to highly variable and “fragmented” hardware across devices. However, now that more devices come with Vulkan support, Google is transitioning towards a unified rendering stack.
In the five-minute video titled “Ask Android: 6 must-know updates for game developers,” Matthew McCullough, VP of Product on Android, stated that Vulkan will now be the foundation for all graphics rendering on the platform.
This move is important since it means that now all apps that require the device’s GPU, will have to do so via Vulkan. This API is particularly beneficial because it offers greater control over the GPU hardware when compared to older APIs like OpenGL. This, coupled with the ability to allow ray-tracing and multi-threading will allow developers to make better games for the platform.
For older devices lacking Vulkan support, ANGLE will be used as a sandwich layer, essentially translating OpenGL ES calls to Vulkan. Also, for newer devices without OpenGL support, ANGLE will handle the translation bit, acting as the OpenGL ES driver.
This is all we know for now, but rest assured that we will keep you updated as new information becomes available.
