ARM demo shows that Vulkan will reduce power usage in games

If you’re into gaming, you must have heard about Vulkan - the successor to OpenGL/DirectX that’s based on AMD’s Mantle. See, the thing is that OpenGL was designed in the era when computers had one processor with one “core” (back then we didn’t even talk about cores).

These days, mobile chipsets have anything between 4 and 10 CPU cores and OpenGL just doesn’t make efficient use of them. Here lies Vulkan’s strength - it can spread the workload between all available cores.

This gives it a two-fold advantage. First, many entry-level and mid-range chipsets have only power-efficient Cortex-A53 cores. Vulkan-based games will see a performance improvement here.

Even chipsets that have beefy cores (say A73 or Kryo) will see a benefit. Spreading the workload means that each core can run at a lower frequency and that means much lower power draw. Remember that a CPU running at 2GHz draws more than twice the power of a CPU running at 1GHz.

Here’s a demo video coming from ARM itself. It’s important to note that both the OpenGL and Vulkan versions render identical graphics. The end result shows a 15% power saving (and that was measured on a real chipset, it’s not just a prediction).

Vulkan has relatively low adoption, but it should grow fast - it’s a must-have requirement for Android 7.0 Nougat. So any phone that gets updated can run Vulkan games.

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