High fidelity graphics with ArkGraphics 3D on HarmonyOS NEXT

ArkGraphics 3D developed by Huawei, is a low-level, efficient hardware-accelerated 3D graphics and compute shader API. It extends the Ark Engine and is often compared to other low-level APIs. Huawei now sits among many few companies with their own graphics stack such as Nvidia, Microsoft with DirectX, Direct3D and Apple’s Metal API.

Launched with HarmonyOS 4.0 in August 2023, ArkGraphics 3D is part of a suite of APIs under Ark Engine. It’s used outside of the Vulkan native development kit (NDK) for game development across a range of Huawei devices in the IoT mobile computing space that takes advantage of it’s high performance HiSilicon GPU chips that is now in-house, with Maleoon 910 from Kirin 9000s featured on HarmonyOS 4 powered Mate 60 series and MatePad 13.2 tablet that will take advantage of the complete HarmonyOS NEXT graphics stack in the upcoming HarmonyOS Galaxy Edition update this fall, end of Q3 into Q4 2024.

ArkGraphics 3D serves as the primary graphics stack for low-level game applications. OpenAtom warehouse developers have gathered Chinese game engine Cocos, alongside major international US-based Unity Engine and Unreal Engine China that also support this new graphics API for HarmonyOS NEXT, thanks to OpenHarmony base that helps create a bridge between vendors, developers frameworks and engines, toolkits with the operating system APIs taking advantage of optimising games at the system, kernel and hardware level. Huawei vertical integration development put the company in a long term edge over it’s competitors on Android platform of various chipsets, versions, frameworks, that lead to fragmentation, unoptimized applications and games. Huawei addresses these problems with their future HiSilicon powered hardware products emulating Apple’s vertical integration of the ecosystem.