Today, Google Play Store is flooded with many high graphics games and developers are trying to balance out the graphics of their games with the available hardware in phones. Yesterday, Google announced that Android will support Vulkan, a low-overhead graphics API to enhance the graphics of the games.

The main objective of Vulkan is similar to that of Apple’s Metal API for OS X and iOS. Vulkan is actually a low-overhead graphics API, which will allow developers to have more direct access to the GPU and have more control over the rendering of their graphics.

Android will support Vulkan and it is being developed and maintained by the Khronos Group. It seems that Vulkan is basically the next generation of OpenGL. Earlier this year in March, the Khronos group announced Vulkan together with a range of hardware and software partners. But the API requires support from the OS and at that time Google was not yet on board.

Android will support Vulkan and Google’s Android group said in a blog post regarding it:

“This will enable Khronos to test Vulkan drivers across platforms and hardware, and improve the 3D graphics ecosystem as a whole.”

Yesterday, Imagination Technologies uploaded a video on YouTube demonstrating how Vulkan driver performs better than OpenGL ES 3.0 driver running on an Intel-based Nexus Player Android device, including Imagination’s PowerVR G6430 GPU.

Ashley Smith, Imagination Technologies developer, said:

“One advantage of Vulkan over OpenGL ES is that the developer has more visibility of the memory that needs to be allocated. With OpenGL ES the driver handles most of the allocation and hides it away from the developer. With Vulkan the memory that the driver allocates is very minimal and the developer can use different memory allocation strategies.”

Android will support Vulkan in the coming future, but there are very less chances that it will be a part of Google’s Android M operating system when it will be launched later this year. The search engine giant supports the OpenGL ES standard on Android and it will continue to do so.