| haqqaton said: Not entirely true. Even though consoles have had their very own low level APIs for decades it's always a nice thing to have a standard API that will work on every device from now on. It could make the porting job a lot easier. Aside from that, when you say that Switch is OpenGL 4.5 and Vulkan complaint you're actually saying that it's hardware supports a myriad of features present on those APIs. It doesn't mean that they will utilize those APIs, obviously, instead it means that they are present to be used by them or by the very own console low level API. Some say that Wii U has a OpenGL 4.2 compliant GPU. We know now that Switch's GPU is OpenGL 4.5 compliant. It means that there's a lot of new features present on GPU that's available to both OpenGL AND Switch own low level API. I didn't say it will use Vulkan. I said that it has Vulkan capabilities. |
Yes, you are correct regarding how the supporter version of OpenGL indicates which features it supports. Having them as options isn't a problem, it's a good feature. However, it's more important to have a simple low-level API. PS4 is usually considered a machine that allows easy porting from PC or other platforms and it uses GCM as its API. Devs usually say it is quite similar to DirectX, so basically designing a good native API is good enough to facilitate porting.
My critic is about the videos on the post. They compare OpenGL and Vulkan showing how Vulkan allows to decrease the cost behind draw calls and which improvements it can bring to performance. This is true for mobile devices, PCs, etc. But if it won't indicate how it will compare with the Wii because it already uses a low overhead native API. So we won't have any magical gain here regarding the API. The videos show a high-overhead API lacking behind a low-overhead one, but even Vulkan will still have a higher overhead than Wii U native APIs, while the Switch API will probably be more on par with what we expect from consoles.
