| JEMC said: I'd say that supporting open standards isn't something that makes you gain marketshare, but prevents you from losing it. But that's up to anyone's opinion. The only move to open standards that can cause them to increase their marketshare is, imho, FreeSync. Being noticeably cheaper than its G-Sync counterparts make them an attractive purchase, that encourages the use of AMD cards. Of course, the industry will have an open standard with HDMI 2.1 (or something like that), so we'll see how things go for AMD and Nvidia when that gets rolled into consumer products. |
That argument breaks down pretty easily if we take a look at Nvidia ... (HDMI is not an open standard either as that's determined by the HDMI fourm and HDMI also collects royalties too to top it off. I think what you meant was 'industry wide' supported standards. Proprietary technology succeeds in comparison to open standards because of industry wide adoption. Ironically Freesync only succeeded when a 'proprietary' technology such as HDMI adopted the functionality and thus we get progress and the betterment of display technology in the end all thanks to group of bodies shoving these standards down other's throats.)
| JEMC said: The console optimizations were always a thing I had doubts with when people started claiming that AMD would benefit from consoles having AMD GPUs. Consoles use their own tweaked APIs (OpenGL for PS4, DX 12 for XOne) that are optimized for the specific characteristics of the tech inside them. Hoping that devs would use that knowledge on PC, where most of them use yet another API (DX 11) and there are hundreds of different configurations, always looked a bit optimistic. |
I would say AMD is benefiting from consoles having AMD GPUs ... (PC games featuring shader intrinsics/async compute/FP16)
PS4 does not use OpenGL (it uses GNM/GNMX) and the X1 uses customized DirectX ... (Devs have a similar enough option on PC known as DX12 and if they don't want to use it they could always opt-in for driver extensions with DX11 instead so that AMD can still benefit from console programming.)
| JEMC said: But in the end, all this discussion about asking AMD to make their own software is a bit mood, because AMD already made that with Mantle. Yet, the industry wasn't interested in it, only DICE and a handful more devs decided to use it properly, so AMD decided to give up and gifted it to Kronos to turn it into Vulkan. |
Mantle was an entire gfx API altogether (DX12 was the permanent solution), AMD driver extensions only amount to several new functions or built-ins and is designed to be used ON TOP of existing APIs ... (Just as API is one layer the driver layer is another hotbed and a proprietary one at that to access hardware features not exposed in the core gfx API.)
Even if the industry isn't interested in the vendor agnostic alternative (DX12) much to AMD's detriment then AMD should have a fallback by exposing these proprietary hardware features in their DX11 drivers so that devs can use them instead if they don't want to deal with another gfx API for now ...
