Unity game engine brings Vulkan support to Android, expect drastic improvement in performance

Unity, the popular, free, cross-platform game development engine has announced support for the Vulkan rendering API on Android and Linux. Windows support is coming soon. The Unity engine is extremely popular among game developers, and with good reason. PC games like Firewatch have been built on the game, as have spectacular mobile games like Crossy Road and Monument Valley. The latest announcement means that Android users will see a dramatic improvement in performance and/or quality in the upcoming games.

The Vulkan API (Application Programming Interface) is graphics that essentially gives programmers direct access to graphics hardware. Oversimplifying its working, Vulkan, like DirectX 12, virtually eliminates CPU overhead, bypassing a major bottleneck when rendering frames. As a result of this, frames are rendered faster and more CPU time is available for other tasks. Unity claims that the rendering API can result in 35 percent improvement in frame-time ( not to be confused with frame-rate), which is a significant number. The Vulkan API is based on AMD’s Mantle API and is an evolution of the OpenGL API. The best example of Vulkan can be seen in Bethesda’s Doom remake. With the Vulkan update, we saw up to 30 percent improvement in frame-rates in that game. The current graphics API used by most Android phones is OpenGL ES 3.1. Unity’s blog explains that games running on phones without Vulkan support will switch to OpenGL ES. Unity’s Vulkan API support is currently in beta mode, however, with only the Vulkan Rendering Preview being made available to developers. Expect full support for the API in upcoming updates.