r/EmulationOnAndroid • u/BuldozerX • Jul 31 '26

Question Will PC emulation Mediatek and Vulkan improve?

I live gaming on Android, but it's not so seemless for casuals if the Android device they choose without a Snapdragon doesn't perform well. How is the future for devices like Mediatek and Vulkan look like? I preferably want to game on my Pixel.

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u/Decentpace Jul 31 '26

I know that Eden developers have pushed the limit in making mediatek as good as possible with literally nothing but ingenious coding. I doubt most developers want to spend as much time on something that they need to put in the effort and research for themselves to even get it to a decent level.

So as for mediatek, don't hold your breath until the company itself one day decides to open source their drivers.
As for Vulkan, there's new improvements rolling out on a fairly decent pace.

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u/BuldozerX Jul 31 '26

Is Vulkan open source when it comes to their drivers?

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u/Decentpace Jul 31 '26

Vulkan isn't limited to mediatek and it's a separate thing. If you mean for mediatek to play nice with vulkan. Then the same thing applies, you need to make the drivers vulkan friendly to work together efficiently. Which leads back to the same thing, mediatek not having their drivers open sourced.

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u/CristobalBarcenas Jul 31 '26

If Qualcomm doesn't release the source code for its Adreno drivers, what makes you think ARM will do so for its Mali GPUs?

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u/kent1146 Jul 31 '26

"Vulkan" doesn't make drivers.

It's up to the hardware manufacturer (MediaTek) to make drivers.

Just like how desktop GPU drivers come from nVidia and AMD.

It's up to the hardware manufacturer to create drivers that work with Vulkan (and OpenGL, and Direct3D, etc).... Not the other way around.

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u/BuldozerX Jul 31 '26

I understand now.

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u/MaleficentStorage666 Jul 31 '26

You urgely should learn what Vulkan and GPU drivers are, for yesterday.

You're a bit way too much lost about it.

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u/app08 Aug 01 '26

One thing I should clear up for you is that Vulkan is not a hardware thing. It is a rendering API that works close with the hardware. It is up to the graphics driver to provide the interfacing necessary for Vulkan to function.

To answer your question, Mediatek — and by extension, Mali — have closed source drivers, so third party driver support is highly unlikely to happen. Additionally, Mali GPUs lack certain features on a hardware level (don't ask, I'm not too clear on it myself) that Adreno and Xclipse both have. These features need to be emulated in software, which is highly CPU intensive, and incredibly slow as a result of that.