Do Prefer Explicit APIs

Graphical applications made using explicit APIs tend to run more efficiently, if set up correctly.

Vulkan is a new generation graphics and compute API. It is highly efficient, streamlined, and modern, and designed to take advantage of current and future device architectures. Vulkan works on a wide variety of platforms such as desktop PCs, consoles, mobile devices, and embedded devices.

Vulkan makes full use of modern CPUs

Vulkan is designed from the ground up to take advantage of modern CPU architectures such as multi-core and multi-threaded systems, and rendering work can be spread over many logical threads. The Vulkan “Gnome Horde” demo in the PowerVR SDK shows this aspect of the API.

Vulkan does require more work upfront

Vulkan is designed to have minimal driver overhead, but this comes at the cost of a more complex programming paradigm – explicit. In Vulkan, it is up to the application developer to handle low level details such as memory allocation for buffers and explicit synchronisation between resources. However, once the API is mastered, a Vulkan graphics application is likely to run much more efficiently and more predictably across various devices compared to legacy graphics APIs.

PowerVR and Vulkan

Our PowerVR SDK includes a framework for developers targeting PowerVR platforms. This framework reduces the need for boilerplate code, provides helpers, and much more, making Vulkan development much easier.