Imagination Technologies is a British semiconductor R&D and licencing company that you might have, or might not have heard of. You have probably heard of the PowerVR mobile graphics processors though, and this company is actually responsible for those GPUs. Imagination Technologies have announced the new PowerVR chipsets for mobile, IoT and wearables back in March, along with the Vulkan API, a new graphics API for PowerVR Rogue GPUs. That being said, Imagination Technologies have just announced a partnership with one of the biggest companies in the world, read on.
The company has announced a partnership with Google in order to demonstrate an advanced prototype of their new Vulkan graphics API on Android which we’ve mentioned in the previous paragraph. The Gnome Horde demo will be presented at SIGGRAPH 2015, and it runs on the PowerVR GPU inside the Nexus Player. The Gnome Horde is specifically designed to showcase the capability of Vulkan, and ”meet the needs of Andriod graphics developer community”.
If you take a look at the video down below, you’ll get to see Vulkan in action (on the left), along with OpenGL ES 3.0 (on the right). Keep in mind that this is actually an exaggerated scenario, it is meant to emphasize Vulkan’s strengths. The company wanted to be clear that they’re using OpenGL ES in a rather weird way, and are not trying to show it in a bad light. The Vulkan graphics API will also influence the battery life of the devices, it seems like it is rather battery friendly, which is always a good thing.
One rather important advantage that Vulkan has over Open GL ES, is the fact that it offers the developer more visibility of the memory that needs to be allocated. What does this mean? Well, if an image is not being used by the GPU, the developer can opt to use that memory for other purposes. In short, Vulkan API will bring new optimization opportunities to the table, and will probably increase efficiency overall. There you have it folks, it seems like Vulkan graphics API is ready for action, and if you’re interested to learn more, follow the source link down below.
