Published in Graphics

Nvidia signs up to Vulkan

by on18 February 2016


Shield will live long and prosper

Nvidia has announced a development version of Android 6.0 Marshmallow for the Shield platform along with support for Windows and Linux.

This means that Shield Android TV, Shield K1 and Shield tablet developers will be able to use Vulkan and Linux and Windows.

Nvidia will be rolling out support for the Vulkan API in subsequent versions of Android 6.0 Marshmallow, and these builds of the software are reported to be undergoing final testing and should be available soon.

The move puts Nvidia ahead on Vulkan adoption. Qualcomm is working on Vulkan drivers for the Adreno 400-range and the 530 and Google is adding Vulkan support to Android, although this has not been announced.

Nvidia wants developers to use its Shield gear as development devices. Already its gear with Vulkan drivers was used as part of Occulus AI development to cut down on CPU time.

Compared with OpenGL, Vulkan makes better use of multi-core processing by allowing developers to better control their applications. It does this through allowing deeper control of the hardware, giving developers the opportunity to creating and managing multiple threads on both CPU and GPU cores.

It could potentially show significant performance benefits when software is restricted by the CPU and the hardware has idle GPU cores. The technology streamlines and accelerate memory access, which is important for applications where a lot of memory is consumed by the graphics.

Last modified on 18 February 2016
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