This is a very exciting time for Graphics. Today marked the release of Vulkan, which is the latest graphics API to be developed by the Khronos group. It has been completely redesigned from the ground up with a much greater emphasis on low-level efficiency. Some of the key features include better multi-threading support, reduced CPU workloads and for the first time, desktop and mobile will use the same graphics API. This last feature will make generating content for both mobile and desktop even easier. More information about Vulkan can be found in the community ARM Vulkan: Built for Modern Mobile Systems and on the Khronos Website
As it is a completely new API we appreciate there could be a learning curve required. Help is at hand though as the Mali Graphics Debugger now has Vulkan support. This means that you will be able to trace your Vulkan applications and see what function calls are being used in your application and in what order. It will also detect end-of-frame events so that you can see what function calls were involved in making each frame.
 |  |
Keep checking the ARM Connected Community as over the coming few months the MGD Engineers will be working hard to implement even more features to make your transition from OpenGL ES to Vulkan easier. We'd also love to hear your thoughts below on how to make Vulkan support in MGD be as good as it can possibly be.