android extension pack?

[Nintonito]

With L google announced the android extension pack, designed to bring DX11 type features to android without OpenGL platform support. Has anyone investigated how feasable it would be to implement? Or is sticking exclusively with GL 4.4 the best option?

[mbc07]

Sounds like a DX11 -> OGL wrapper for me. As far as I know, if that's the case, it'll probably be slower than developing OGL ES directly...

[Sonicadvance1]

You're actually slightly wrong about it bringing D3D11 features in.
It's actually more of a convenience extension that Android has whipped up designed around the Adreno hardware that Google is pushing to make sure all the vendors will have since, I'm speculating on this part, Android thinks Khronos should have added more features to OpenGL ES 3.1.
Both Qualcomm(a4xx only) and Nvidia support this extension, which makes sense because the extension is literally everything that Qualcomm can do with it's a4xx hardware, and Nvidia only needed to expose the extensions required to support the extension.
The only real thing in the extension that is good for us is that is forces the vendors to support an optional feature in OpenGL ES 3.1. Yea, Khronos made a specification that has a feature that is optional to support, it's stupid as shit.
Anyway, the optional feature is supporting image units in fragment/vertex shaders, which we can use to support a new version of texture decoding on the GPU that isn't a broken OpenCL implementation.
We could have worked around the limitation, but it would have to be uglier and nobody wants that. It also had a good chance of being slower due to the work around.

That's about it, it adds mandated support for a optional feature, that's about all it does for us. Desktop GL is still the better option.
Also I don't know how long it'll take to implement GPU texture decoding again. It isn't an actively worked on feature.

[Nintonito]

Well it certainly sounded like garbage. But hopefully the mandatory support proves beneficial in the long run. I doubt this will be the last ES version with "optional features"