Epic mobile graphics showcase wows with Vulkan API help

With the release earlier this month of the Vulkan API, many have been wondering just how effective it could be in improving in-game performance on current-gen hardware. It turns out quite a lot and not just on high-powered desktops either. In a new demo crafted by Epic Games, we get to see just how good a 3D title can look on a Samsung Galaxy S.

Called ProtoStar, the demonstration features exploding rocks in an enclosed space, showering particles and fragments all over the place. Much like AMD’s Mantle API that Vulkan is built upon and DirectX12, a big improvement over traditional APIs, is that it massively improves CPU performance by allowing better usage of the multiples cores of modern chips, which can help in getting many more tracked objects on screen.

But Vulkan allows for more than just particles. Lighting in ProtoStar is fantastic, textures are very high-definition and the whole experience is very pretty – and yet it’s all running on a new-gen smartphone. The whole point of this showcase is to debut what the combination of newer chips and the Vulkan API can deliver. Smartphones can be much more graphically powerful in the future.

“ProtoStar introduces a slew of new Unreal Engine 4 rendering achievements on mobile,” said Epic in a release. “Including dynamic planar reflections; full GPU particle support on mobile, including vector fields; temporal anti-aliasing (TAA); high-quality ASTC texture compression; full scene dynamic cascaded shadows; chromatic aberration; mobile dynamic light refraction; filmic tonemapping; improved mobile static reflections; high-quality mobile depth of field; and Vulkan API support with thousands of dynamic objects onscreen.”

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KitGuru Says: That is rather impressive. With this and DirectX12 just around the corner, the next generation of hardware from both AMD and Nvidia is likely the be monstrously powerful.

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