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Samsung's Vulkan experiment could add 40 minutes to your phone's battery life

Samsung's Vulkan experiment could add 40 minutes to your phone's battery life

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AndroidCentral

Samsung already gives developers the option to create with the Vulkan API on Galaxy S7s, but now, the company has demonstrated how big of a difference the low-level graphics API could make. Samsung said at its annual Samsung Developer Conference yesterday that it rebuilt its home launcher using Vulkan, and internal tests show that using the API could reduce battery consumption by up to 6 percent when users are scrolling through pages or opening their app tray. This could lead to up to 40 extra minutes of battery life on a 3600 mA/h battery, or just enough time for me to send out some "phone dying; bye forever" texts.

Google is also testing Vulkan on its Android N developer preview, which it thinks will lead to "significant" performance improvements for graphic-intensive apps, if developers take advantage of it. Apple has a similar development platform, Metal, which also gives developers low-level access to the GPU in order to make more efficient, performant graphics.