potato_hamster said:
My apologizes. I have been vague and bit misleading. Consoles do in fact use APIs in similar ways to PCs. However, consoles use two different kinds of APIs. There first kind are lower-level "to the metal" APIs that interact directly with the hardware in a way PCs do not. This is not what most people mean when they refer to APIs. These low-level APIs are more streamlined more effienct, and, are optimized specifically for the single hardware spec. The console also has higher level APIs, which interact with the OS, controllers, networking etc. this is what most people refer to when they talk about APIs. You can still actually send commands to things like the processor or GPU directly, but this isn't as common as it used to be. I was trying to make it easier and I ended up complicating things. |
So you intentially mislead the situation to attempt to red herring your way through a debate. Interesting, I'm not shocked.
For the record I've always been genuine, which is why I give specific and legitimate examples to prove my point. Also the level of abstraction has closed with the creation of newer APIs like Mantle, Vulkan and DX12, which will all run on Windows 10 and all but definitely onwards. Games are going to be made for that, to work across the very complex environment that I used as my example of why multiple types of hardware and performance scaling of games is not going to be an issue for Nintendo and NX.
PC would actually be a more worse case scenario and it's already outright proven to not require porting between X spec to Y PC spec, it just works, provided vendors for processing tech support those games. In the case of NX it would be Nintendo adding their own devices and drivers for that into the OS.
It would actually be simpler than supporting individual platforms as they do now, because these devices and their one OS are made to work this way from day one and not built with their own development environments. No porting is needed, just driver updates and within those driver updates Nintendo optimizes their own software features for the API.
With DX11 developers can interact with the hardware on a much closer level to the hardware, if they choose, it's just that this introduces issues for the developers, like giving them tonnes of extra work, because it's not an automated thing and DX11 wasn't designed to make this easy for all developers, DX12 and others like it change this by the API being written to be much thinner and include dedicated libraries to basically do this extra work for developers. No specific writing is needed to take advantage of more efficient programming techniques and as a result performance is gained.
Using a PS3 comparison to PC doesn't work for the here and now, because things have changed this generation and new APIs were designed to close the gap in API efficiency.
Anyway having a few specs, with the same architecture doesn't prevent optimization to get the most out of those platforms. Hell platform holders have to optimize their APIs and work on their development tools anyway. Bringing the handheld and console together basically makes this easier because the API developers are working with the same architecture. The handheld is using the same type of CPU and GPU core tech, it's just a portion of it's bigger brother. The OS incorporates both devices or any others Nintendo adds to it. Nintendo's API developers remove any roadblocks for game developers to make their games simply to work unimpeded on both and they just finalize the end settings that feel fits best for each game.
