The recently revealed “Android O” may not have knocked it out of the park for Google, but there is a nifty feature coming to the upgraded platform that will appeal in particular to mobile gamers — graphic driver updates independent of full OS ones.
Google’s Romain Guy parted the knowledge in a Q&A during one of Google I/O 2017’s technical sessions:
Updating all graphics drivers — we now, in O, have the ability to update graphics drivers from the [Google] Play store.
I’d like to give you more information, but that’s all Guy revealed. Nothing regarding vendor support or functionality.
Depending on how flexible the update process is, it could allow game and app-specific performance tweaks to be released way ahead of official platform patches. GPU companies such as NVIDIA and AMD do this all the time for big game releases and while the market is quite different on mobile, the rise of VR and AR could make the need for “hotfixing” significantly more relevant.
[YouTube, via Android Police]