Launched last week as Vulkan 1.0 following a rapid 18-month development cycle, and based on code contributed by AMD from its retired Mantle project , Vulkan is designed as a next-generation successor to The Khronos Group's OpenGL API. Like Microsoft's rival Direct3D 12, Vulkan is designed as a low-level API: its chief advantages over OpenGL include lower driver overhead and greater ability to make use of many-core system processors and multiple GPUs. The result should, in theory, mean higher framerates for everyone - with particular benefit to those running on lower-end devices where the driver overhead gives a particularly heavy hit.During Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked event at the Mobile World Congress, Epic Games' Tim Sweeney confirmed that Unreal Engine 4 is the first major licensable engine to gain Vulkan support, including the ability to use Vulkan on mobile hardware. '' he told the crowd at the event. 'The support comes with a new real-time Vulkan-driven ',' which is a fancy word for 'tech demo,' running on Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S7 smartphone connected to the company's Gear VR headset: ProtoStar. The support for Vulkan, the company has claimed, allows the smartphone to support far more dynamic objects on-screen at any given time than would have been possible under OpenGL or its embedded variant OpenGL ES.A run-through of the Vulkan-powered ProtoStar is reproduced below, though sadly only in two dimensions.