At Google IO, Google announced that OpenGL ES 3.1 and the Android Extension Pack going to be are released in the upcoming Android L release. OpenGL ES 3.1 brings cleaner shader support and compute shaders, while the Android Extension Pack is a set of extensions to OpenGL ES which provides support for tessellation and geometry shaders, and ASTC compression formats. This is an important step because (for those GPU’s that support 3.1, which are the majority that support 3.0) will enable some rendering techniques that have long been used by desktop rendering systems, including;
- HDR Tone Mapping
- More Efficient/Better Smoke/Particles Effects
- Deferred Shading
- Global Illumination & Reflection
- Physically Based Shading
“Quite literally, this is PC gaming graphics in your pocket” Dave Burke, Android engineering director at Google.