Google will require new Android 16 devices to support this game-changing graphics feature

New Android 16 devices must support Host Image Copy, a Vulkan 1.4 feature that reduces stuttering, load times, & memory use

Apr 4, 2025 - 14:43

The latest version of the Vulkan graphics API, Vulkan 1.4, introduces a feature called Host Image Copy.
A Google engineer says games using Host Image Copy can remove stutter during texture data streaming while also halving memory use.
Devices launching with chipset built for Android 16 or later will be required to support the Host Image Copy feature.

The best Android games look significantly better now than they did a few years ago, thanks to both more powerful hardware for developers and improved graphics rendering features in Android. Today, most Android devices support Vulkan, the industry standard API for graphics and compute. Vulkan allows games to run efficiently on modern devices, and the latest version of the API, Vulkan 1.4, introduces a feature that could greatly improve game performance on upcoming Android 16 devices.

The Vulkan graphics API is a modern, low-overhead, cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API. It gives developers more direct control over the GPU than the older OpenGL API, which Vulkan replaces. This more direct control reduces CPU overhead, leading to improved performance in multi-threaded apps and games, and enables games to utilize advanced features supported by modern smartphone GPUs, such as ray tracing.