Think Silicon, a firm that delivers ultra-low power graphics IP technology recently open sourced GLOVE (GL Over Vulkan). GLOVE, a middleware allows Android, Linux, and Windows OS developers to seamlessly run OpenGL ES on supported hardware by translating OpenGL ES API calls to Vulkan API commands at runtime.
Why GLOVE (GL Over Vulkan)?
OpenGL and OpenGL ES are the most widely used standards for the development of graphics-based applications. Increased complexity of driver’s implementation based on OpenGL and OpenGL ES led to the introduction of Vulkan (a lower-level API that transfers much of the driver’s functionality to the application-side). However, in most situations, a direct transition to Vulkan requires additional efforts by the developers and vendors. This means they are forced to maintain driver support for both Vulkan and OpenGL.
With the introduction of GLOVE, developers can seamlessly transition their software between both Vulkan and OpenGL APIs. Following this, vendors are able to discard duplicate OpenGL ES drivers and rely solely on a lighter implementation of the Vulkan API.
Additional features of GLOVE
GLOVE allows running OpenGL ES calls not only on Android and Linux systems but also on Windows operating systems, which was not possible before.
It also offers the possibility to run legacy applications and games on top of Vulkan at a glance. This saves a lot of effort and provides backward compatibility.
It allows you to quickly explore Vulkan driver capabilities and performance by using existing OpenGL ES code.
Its modular design can be easily extended to encompass implementations of other client APIs as well.
Dimitris Georgakakis, Team Lead, Graphics Software Stack, Think Silico said, “We are excited to release GLOVE™ as Open Source Project to the graphics developer community and we will continue our efforts to support more platforms and features to ensure GLOVE™ can be useful in a lot of use cases.”
Read more about GLOVE (GL Over Vulkan) on ThinkSilicon release notes.
