The Godot Foundation just announced a new 3 way partnership between Godot, Google and game engine experts The Forge to improve Vulkan support on mobile devices in the Godot game engine.
Details of the announcement from the Godot blog:
We are excited to announce that we have partnered with Google and The Forge to bring some helpful performance optimizations to our Vulkan mobile backend. This will primarily benefit users targeting Vulkan-capable mobile devices.
Google is committed to enhancing the Android gaming ecosystem by ensuring that Vulkan is well supported across many games, game engines, and devices. Lucky for us, this means that they have decided to help us ensure that our Vulkan mobile renderer is as efficient as possible.
The Forge is one of the premier developers in the world specializing in building custom game engines and rendering solutions as well as optimizing existing game engines.
The Forge will spend the next several months working on Godot and bringing their expertise to our engine. They will be assisted by experts at Google and, of course, Godot contributors.
We are excited to welcome The Forge into the Godot pool of contributors and we are very thankful to Google for their assistance as well!
The end goal for all of us is to create an amazing ecosystem for games on Android. We are happy to already participate in that ecosystem and look forward to allowing game developers to push their ideas even further with Vulkan.
I tried to get some clarification of exactly what Google was doing in this partnership and had the following exchange on Twitter:
If you are interested in learning more about The Forge, you can do so here and check out their open source rendering framework (of the same name) available on GitHub.
You can learn more about the collaboration and details about The Forge and what they bring to the equation in the video below.