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Soleron on 05 June 2014
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famousringo said:
Soleron said:

We're heading for a fragmented market. It's not like devs will be able to put down OpenGL just because Apple has Metal and AMD has Mantle. What will Android use? Nvidia on Steambox? PS4?

The devs think this will save them work; actually it will create it.


This is about optimizing performance, not saving work. Saving work is Swift's job. 

You'll notice all the talk about the engine handling the use of Metal. If you're okay with your game only working on A7+ hardware and iOS 8, the engine builds with Metal. If you want compatibility with older iOS devices and Android devices, it builds with OpenGL and you take a performance hit.

PS4 already has this "close to the metal" functionality, so I'm not sure why you bring that up, but this is somewhere that I don't think Android can go. Too many hardware configurations to support. In hindsight, with Apple's console-like control of the whole stack in iOS, it's surprising this didn't come along sooner.

Performance isn't the major problem in the industry right now. Cost is.