Arm has released “Vulkan Best Practices for Mobile Developers Tutorials” on GitHub. You can read a quick overview of what this new tutorial is all about in the Khronos Blog.

Magic Leap has made the session on Seedling from Insomniac Games available to the public. Featuring Joel Bartley, lead gameplay programmer for Insomniac Games, and Michael Liebenow, lead software engineer for Magic Leap, the session examines how to integrate a 3D engine into an app using the Vulkan API. “We support two low-level rendering APIs, both Vulkan and OpenGL, but we feel that Vulkan provides more opportunities for optimization, which is especially important when you’re trying to get all the performance you can out of a mobile system, and that is one of the main reasons why we recommend Vulkan for your development,” said Liebenow during the session.

European Union-funded researchers have today released a tool suite which enables developers to deliver longer battery life in mobile devices, while ensuring high quality and performance. The LPGPU2 tool-suite helps programmers develop power-efficient code for GPUs by identifying bottlenecks relating to performance (for example in terms of frames-per-second) and power (for example in terms of energy per instruction). The LPGPU2 tool suite has benefited from the expertise of a range of academic and industrial partners including Khronos members Samsung, who designed and implemented the data collection frameworks and feedback engine; Think Silicon validated it on their four-core NEMA GPU system and Codeplay extended AMD’s CodeXL tool, allowing programmers to profile their SYCL applications. Download the tool suite from the GitHub repository.

The new Samsung OS–Tizen 3.0–will support Vulkan. The Z4, Samsung’s newest phone will be running Tizen 3.0 and supporting Vulkan.

Neil Trevett and Paul from Red Gaming Tech discuss the plans with Vulkan, game development, virtual reality technology, mobile gaming, optimization and game development, hardware and a whole lot more.

The Khronos Developer Day Session videos from GDC 2017 are now on YouTube. The videos include “Reach the Largest Gaming Platform of All: The Web. WebGL, WebVR and glTF”, “Refocusing on VR Innovation: Can Standards Simplify Cross-Platform Virtual Reality Development?”, “Vulkan Game Development on Mobile”, “Vulkan on Desktop Deep Dive”, “When Vulkan was One: Looking Back, Looking Ahead.”

Celebrating a successful first year, the Vulkan API is gaining tremendous momentum in high-fidelity gaming. Vulkan support appears in leading game engines such as Unity and Unreal, numerous game studios actively developing Vulkan titles, and a dozen Vulkan titles shipping including Doom, Quake, The Talos Principle and Dota 2. Vulkan drivers are also shipping from all of the major GPU manufacturers for desktop and mobile systems. Today, Khronos has released new Vulkan extensions for cross-platform access to Virtual Reality and multi-GPU functionality. Find out more about growing Vulkan momentum and the updates and extensions released at GDC here.

Huawei Consumer Business Group event saw the unveiling of the HUAWEI Mate 9 using the Kirin 960 chipset. The Kirin 960 features an ARM Cortex-A73/A53 Octa-core CPU and Mali G71 Octa-core GPU. The GPU boasts a 180 percent performance uplift and a 40 percent improvement in energy efficiency compared to its predecessor. The Kirin 960 also takes full advantage of the pioneering Vulkan graphics standard on Android 7.0, increasing graphics performance by up to 400 percent.

Developer Super Evil Megacorp, which turned heads last year with its Vainglory mobile MOBA, now has a beta version that uses the Vulkan API. Super Evil Megacorp says that this Vulkan-enabled version runs 30% more efficiently on supported hardware, resulting in better battery life, faster controls, and higher framerates.

Samsung Electronics invites game enthusiasts from around the world to enjoy an immersive on-site gaming experience at E3, one of the largest game events in the world. One demo will be the Vulkan API Game Experience with the Galaxy S7 equipped with the Vulkan API that enables game developers to deliver amazing graphics and a high-quality gaming experience. Get the chance to play the first games leveraging the technology, Need for Speed™ No Limits, HIT and Vainglory.

Tom’s Hardware has a nice review on mobile GPUs getting ready for ‘Daydream’ VR. Among the technologies being used are Khronos’ ASTC specification and OpenGL ES. The Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) technology supported by ARM’s latest Mali and other recent GPUs on the market will reduce bandwidth requirements while still delivering decent graphics quality. On the software side, ARM has been optimizing its drivers to reduce latency and ensure fast context switching that is necessary for VR. ARM also enabled a few more OpenGL ES extensions to support efficient rendering to multiple views for both stereo and foveated rendering. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 SoC, which comes with the Adreno 530 GPU, has been optimized for VR. It has support for 3D stereoscopic and foveated rendering, the latest graphics APIs such as OpenGL ES 3.2 and Vulkan, and 360-degree 4k video decoding at 60fps.

Unreal Engine 4’s implementation of Vulkan API enables developers to create visually stunning, cross-platform 3D content that supports more draw calls, and more dynamic objects onscreen, with faster performance than ever before. Watch here to see how it all came together through the making of ProtoStar, revealed at Mobile World Congress 2016.

Unreal Engine 4 is positioning itself as a high-end, high-spec, high-performance engine that delivers impressive visuals on mobile phones, as well as on consoles and PC’s. Given the realism of the early Vulkan demos, it is clear that low-level hardware API like Vulkan is perhaps that magic bullet that the developers needed to develop even the most demanding content in form factors we could only dream off.

Graphics researchers at Samsung Electronics UK have teamed up with mobile graphics specialists Codeplay, Think Silicon and TU Berlin to develop a tool for enabling smartphone batteries to last longer while running advanced video games and using the camera. “Low-power GPU2” (LPGPU2) is a EU-funded research project into low powered graphics devices. It is the work of a specially formed consortium of three companies and one university, all from across the EU, who are collaborating to deliver advances in tools and applications for energy efficient use of mobile GPUs.

The Immersive Technology Alliance held a VR Fest Panel at the Palms Casino Resort during CES in January 2016. The 5 person panel, all Khronos members consisted of Ryan McCall, Director of Sales and Business Development, Futuremark; Frank Soqui, General Manager Enthusiast Desktop Group, Intel; Daryl Sartain, Director of VR, Radeon Technology Group and AMD and VR Council Chair; Tero Sarkkinen, CEO, Basemark; and Neil Trevett, VP Mobile Ecosystem, Nvidia and President of the Khronos Group. The video for this panel is now online.