OpenGL ES 3.1

[Nintonito]

https://www.khronos.org/news/press/khronos-releases-opengl-es-3.1-specification
ES 3.1 had been finalized, the specification has been released. Many existing chipsets will be compatible with the new standard. What are the devs thoughts? Will this help performance on android?

[Sonicadvance1]

Realistically the only thing that GL ES 3.1 adds that are on our agenda for implementing is GPU texture decoding.
GL ES 3.1 partially brings in GL_ARB_shader_image_load_store(for compute shaders) which we would be using to decode/encode textures on the GPU instead of the CPU.
This would be more advantageous on ARM devices than x86 devices because x86 devices have exceedingly quick texture decoding with SSE and greater optimizations, while ARM uses generic texture decoding without optimizations.

We could potentially use the separate shader objects addition as well...

[Nintonito]

Curious question. Would an update to the Gl ES specification have a positive or negative impact on drivers?

[Sonicadvance1]

Know Qualcomm, they'll probably mess up the implementation like they always do.
Other than that I don't think we'll have any reason to think it'll impact drivers in any way. ARM already showed off some mali chip running GLES 3.1 at GDC, and one could easily think that the K1 already supports it since they already support all the new features with the desktop GL implementation.

[Q8-V08]

http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/06/27/android-l-feature-spotlight-opengl-es-3-1-support-for-prettier-games/

No mention of the ART flexycore droidBooster optimizations though, QCOMs dalvik / bionic still runs faster than ART.