[Update] Unreal Engine 4 showcases Vulkan API support, plenty of eye candy in latest tech demo

Update on February 25th at 14:26: Epic has now released a making-of video for the Protostar tech demo and it's even more insane than it seems.

First of all, three studios including Human Head (creators or Prey) were involved in this and the even had a full orchestra doing the soundtrack.

The entire video is quite interesting:

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Epic is really trying to push this API as the future of graphics on mobile and it's certainly pretty.

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During Samsung's unpacked event yesterday at the Mobile World Conference, mobile gaming was emphasized.

Using the power of the newly announced Samsung S7, it showed the latest build of Epic's engine, the Unreal Engine 4, running the Vulkan API.

For those not aware of the latest development in APIs and engines in general, Vulkan is what we call a low-level API. This means that it's an API, like Direct X or Open GL, that uses less overhead and thus enables more effects at a higher framerate.

This is similar to Metal, the API developed by Apple but Vulkan is open source and can be implemented on any engine.

The Unreal Engine 4 is the first engine to support it officially and for a mobile tech demo, this Protostar video looks amazing:

The inclusion of TAA and full reflections of this quality is quite unheard of on mobile.

Keep in mind that Epic used a tech demo like this once and went on to create Infinity Blade so who knows what will come of that.

The future is exciting for Epic's engine and I can't wait to see what kind of games will be created with that technology.