Check Out Epic & Samsung's Unreal 4 & Vulkan-Powered ProtoStar Demo

Easily worth watching.

Just last week, the Khronus Group released the first public version of Vulkan API, which promised some big things for gaming and 3D rendering in general (see here). Today, at Mobile World Congress 2016, Epic and Samsung showed off the first engine-level implementation of Vulkan, and that would be for the Unreal Engine 4.

The 3D rendering demonstration, dubbed 'ProtoStar,' is meant to show off several specific rendering flourishes. One aspect of this demo that is important to remember when viewing, however, is this demo was demonstrated running on the new Samsung Galaxy S7, which goes a long towards the pushing the idea of console-like (or better) graphics.

Here are some of the features on display in the demo:

Dynamic planar reflections (high-quality reflections for dynamic objects)
Full GPU particle support on mobile, including vector fields
Temporal anti-aliasing (TAA)
High-quality ASTC texture compression
Full scene dynamic cascaded shadows
Chromatic aberration
Mobile dynamic light refraction
Filmic tonemapping curve
Improved mobile static reflections
High-quality mobile depth of field
Vulkan API support with thousands of dynamic objects onscreen

This stunning demo is in many ways, undersold on account of the web playback. Be sure that this demo will make its way into phone stores before we see some of the API payoff in a mobile game.

Source: Epic