What are you willing to sacrifice for 60 FPS or higher?

[Pemalite]

fatslob-:O said:

Pemalite said:

Nope, they are all as low-level as each other.

That doesn't mean NVN/Switch isn't doing things Metal/iOS couldn't...
I mean, Microsoft offloaded the handling of draw calls from the CPU and threw it onto the command processor on the GPU for instance which is something that can only be reliably achieved in a fixed hardware environment... But that doesn't make NVN a lower level API that say Metal, it just exposes different features and does a few things differently.

@Bold Well that depends ... 

NVN is specifically built around Nvidia GPUs but I doubt Nvidia would even reveal the Maxwell 2 ISA to Nintendo since that's a closely guarded secret that could potentially fall into the hands of their competitors if they discover it so what Nintendo most likely has is an intermediate representation for common Nvidia GPU uArchs, possibly what I'd describe as custom PTX shaders ... 

NVN is a near perfect match for the Switch in terms of exposing feature sets and matching the shader bytecode format ... 

The original release of Metal is not really on par with NVN. Metal 2 closes the gap somewhat but it still doesn't expose all of the features that Maxwell 2 has such as overestimate conservative rasterization and it just features regular LLVM bytecode which doesn't do the best job in comparison to NVN's shader bytecode for Nvidia GPUs ... 

On PC, Nvidia doesn't really have that many options as far as low level gfx APIs goes but the closest thing you'll get to as direct access as possible comparable to consoles would be DX12 but that's more specific to AMD than it is to Nvidia ... 

That being said, low level shaders are not popular among console devs. They'd rather just depend on GPU compiler to do good codegen for them instead ... 

That doesn't mean it's lower level. Just that's it's optimised for that hardwares particular feature set... Which reinforces my prior point of the Switch having the advantage in this area.

At this point we really are just nitpicking anyway.