Unreal Engine and Vulkan API Demo On Samsung Galaxy S7 Smartphone

By Nathan Kirsch

Epic Games revealed ProtoStar, a real-time 3D experience built with the Unreal Engine 4 game engine at Mobile World Congress 2016. The demo was run on the brand new Samsung Galaxy S7 that was also unveiled at MWC. From what we understand, ProtoStar is the first application down in public that was successfully running the the Vulkan API!.

“The new industry-standard Vulkan API brings key elements of high-end console graphics technology to mobile devices, and Samsung is leading the way with the amazing new Galaxy S7,” said Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games. “As the first engine supporting Vulkan, Unreal Engine 4 provides a solid foundation for developers joining in the mobile graphics revolution.”

Seeing this run on a Galaxy S7 just goes to show how powerful smartphones have become with regards to 3D graphics. The framerate at which the demo was running at on the Galaxy S7 is unknown, but it looks pretty smooth despite having plenty to render. The Samsung Galaxy S7 is priced at $699.99 and is currently available for pre-order.

ProtoStar introduces a slew of new Unreal Engine 4 rendering achievements on mobile, including:

  • 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