At the Google I/O conference, Google revealed that the upcoming version of Android, codenamed Android L, will enhance the platform's graphics considerably.
At the core of Android L is the Android Extension Pack which adds support for graphical features such as tessellation, geometry shaders, and texture compression. Using those features, Google and Epic were able to deliver "high quality PC graphics" on smartphones.
"In less than three weeks we ported content built for high-end PC and the DirectX 11 graphics API to Android and Google's AEP (Android Extension Pack) extensions for ES 3.1," said Epic Games.
According to Epic, all the assets used in the demo were brought directly from its PC Samaritan demo which was used to showcase cutting edge Unreal Engine 4 capabilities on high-end PCs. The demo runs at full detail on NVIDIA's Tegra K1 mobile processor.
During CES in January, NVIDIA unveiled Tegra K1 chipset. Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang billed it as the "first ever console-class mobile technology, enabling PC-class gaming technologies like DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.4 and tessellation." According to Huang, Tegra K1 is more powerful than Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 while using a fraction of their power.
Tech demos such as the one above usually deliver higher graphics quality than possible in actual games that need to dedicate part of the hardware's processing power to AI and physics.
