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In contrast to showing off the latest iOS capabilities on Apple’s stage, as seen with the Unreal Engine 4-powered Zen Garden playthrough at WWDC, Epic Games recently launched a massive effort for Android when Google needed help demonstrating the graphics power of L, the upcoming release of its mobile OS Android.

Epic teamed up with the graphics and tech experts at Nvidia to meet the requirements, which held that the demo should run on an Nvidia Tegra K1 mobile processor and utilise the new features of AEP (Android Extension Pack), a set of APIs that extend the functionality of mobile graphics standard OpenGL ES 3.1.

In less than three weeks, Epic created the Rivalry demo. Set in the Reflections Showcase – which is free to developers subscribed to Unreal Engine 4 – the scene was originally built for a DirectX 11-class PC.

Epic and Nvidia ported the demo, along with new and original content, to Android and AEP. The Rivalry demo runs on the same high-end desktop rendering pipeline.

“It’s the GL ES 3.1 AEP path running the DX11-based desktop UE4 engine,” says Epic’s senior rendering engineer Timothy Lottes. “Same crazy fat G-buffer, deferred shading, reflection probes, screen space reflections, temporal AA algorithm, and so forth, using the scalability options that desktop has. All of this, running on a Tegra K1.”

Google, Epic and Nvidia are providing all the tools developers need to build incredible games for Android devices. AEP adds powerful new extensions to OpenGL ES, bringing PC and console-class features, including tessellation and compute shaders, to Android.

Epic is releasing its work in real-time through the Unreal Engine source code hosted on GitHub, plus free demo content is regularly being pushed to subscribers.

For more information, visit www.unrealengine.com. You can also check out Epic’s archive of Twitch broadcasts at www.youtube.com/UnrealEngine.