Nintendo Switch Added to Hardware Supporting Vulkan, OpenGL 4.5, and OpenGL ES
The new Nintendo hardware supporting these APIs is a good thing for prospective developers.
Khronos group has announced it will add the Nintendo Switch to its list of hardware supporting the development tools OpenGL 4.5, OpenGL ES, and Vulkan.
This announcement is relevant to those who have an interest in developing games for the Nintendo Switch. Developer Ethan Lee pointed out on Twitter that this suggests the Switch could be a more friendly platform to these APIs than the likes of iOS or MacOS.
Nintendo Switch has better OpenGL and OpenGL ES compliance than both macOS and iOS. This is real.
— Ethan Lee (@flibitijibibo) December 19, 2016
OpenGL has been a leading graphical standard for some time, while Vulkan is a newer platform from NVIDIA. Vulkan has been cited as being used to help boost framerate performance among other things in big-budget games. While it is still relatively new and on the cutting edge of development tech, it has been used by notable developers id Software and Valve for Doom and Dota 2 respectively.
-
Shacknews
replyCassidee Moser posted a new article, Nintendo Switch Added to Hardware Supporting Vulkan, OpenGL 4.5, and OpenGL ES
-
Here comes Doom 2016!
-
Portable DooM :)
-
-
Quick edit needed. Villain is an API developed by Kronos Group derived from AMD's Mantel. Nvidia has actually been historically worse off compared to AMD hardware, but it's going to be an important middleware going cross platform.
-
Bah... Villain Vulkan.
-
It wasn't derived from Mantle. Mantle was just added to the overall API early in development. So I guess you could say Mantle is certainly part of its DNA, but the whole thing is bigger than Mantle.
-
Fair enough, either way Nvidia didn't have much to do with its development at this point.
-
Yeah, Nvidia seems to be letting AMD take the lead on low-level API's. They seem content to brute force better graphics, while AMD is looking down the road 10 years when Moore's Law ends, and better programming will be the only way to get higher fidelity visuals.
-
-
[deleted]
-
Yeah, I saw a video of that talk, I guess I remember it differently. Sounded like Vulkan was already under way before AMD donated Mantle
-
-
-
-
