Nintendo Joins Khronos Group

jones_supa writes: Gamasutra reports that Nintendo has quietly joined Khronos Group, the consortium managing the OpenGL and Vulkan graphics APIs. The news was brought to Gamasutra's attention by a NeoGaf post, which notes that Nintendo's name was added to the list of Khronos Group contributing members earlier this month. As a Khronos Group contributor Nintendo has full voting rights and is empowered to participate in the group's API development, but it doesn't have a seat on the Khronos Group board and can't participate in the final ratification process of new API specifications.

Comments

Re:Buh-bye DX12

[Dutch Gun]

Well, that places all of the major players on the side of Vulkan. So long DX12 and Microsoft lock-in.

Nintendo has historically used a customized version of OpenGL for their APIs, as has Sony. So, no one should be surprised to see them take part in this development effort, because these are hardware manufacturers developing their own platforms.

However, every major cross-platform developer or publisher was ALSO likely involved in or closely following the development of DirectX 12. That is, cross-platform developer don't "pick a side" in API wars. These developers have already structured their engine to be largely platform independent, including the renderer. My own little game engine supports DX9, DX11 and OpenGL 4.3. While it's not trivial to do, it's not terribly difficult either, as there are a lot of fundamental similarities between those APIs.

I'm betting that DX12 and Khronos will have many similarities as well. Future game engines will be based on the intersection of features between these two APIs, just like what has happened with previous versions. As far as I've heard, they're both largely rewrites, with similar goals: minimal driver interference, low level APIs used to communicate efficiently communicate with modern shader-based hardware. As such, it stands to reason that Khronos will use similar approaches to accessing the same hardware that DX12 needs to access.

It doesn't look like Windows 10 will flop - Steam HW survey shows it as a very rapidly growing market share of OSes - already at 17%. According to Steam, Windows in total is just under 96%, OS X at a bit over 3%, and Linux is under 1%. Note that these are gaming machines, not general purpose machines, but that's relevant for this discussion.

I really wish OS X and Linux had more inroads in the desktop. I really, really do, but it's a fantasy at this point to think that a new graphics API will somehow break Microsoft's death grip on the desktop.