February 21, 2016

Epic Games Unveils ProtoStar at Samsung Galaxy Unpacked

By Dana Cowley

Epic Games has revealed ProtoStar, a real-time 3D experience built with Unreal Engine 4 technology at Mobile World Congress 2016. Demonstrated on the newly unveiled Samsung Galaxy S7, ProtoStar is the first application using Vulkan API to be shown at Samsung Galaxy Unpacked 2016.

“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.”

Unreal Engine 4’s implementation of Vulkan API enables developers to create visually stunning, cross-platform 3D content that supports more draw calls, and more dynamic objects onscreen, with faster performance than ever before.

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

 

In addition, Vulkan in Unreal Engine 4 gives developers more control on mobile tile-based graphics processors, allowing for very thin and fast graphics drivers, with minimal overhead. Using Vulkan’s separate debug layer, developers can more thoroughly and easily inspect code and fix issues.