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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.
If by "major players" you're excluding all the AA publishers and dev houses, MS, and nVidia, sure. These players are all about DX.
Being part of the group doesn't mean you want it to succeed, it means you need to know what's going on and to have your input to be heard in the event that it does.
I for one would love DX12 (and Windows 10) to flop, or at least for OpenGL Whatever They Call It Now to succeed as a viable alternative, but I'm not so naive as to believe it will happen.
What AA publishers, everyone is closing up shop.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
Supporting it doesn't mean they want it to succeed.
The engine developers need to support everything and they don't much care what wins.
MS obviously wants DX12 to win, as does nVidia because they're neck deep in DX "optimization" programs with devs (to the detriment of performance on AMD hardware).
Valve wants DX to fail because they want to make sure the MS Store never takes off, because they want to remain the dominant storefront for PC games so they can keep taking 30% for hosting downloads.
No one else gives a shit about who wins, they just give a shit about having to support it and thus want to be able to vote on its development track and want to know what changes are coming ahead of time. They're not playing the same fanboy game you are, and you really shouldn't pin your hopes on them based on their membership in a working group.
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.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I still dont know why the desktop is and ever was a battle ground, Linux / Android has won the Mobile space. M$ can take the hit when the desktop goes, the lack luster sales of new PC hardware vs mobile ( tablet etc etc ) is telling.
More than simple sales, the PC is where games (and in fact nearly ALL content) is actually created. Phones and tablets are fine for consuming content, but horrible for *creating* content. It's an open platform where people can generally do whatever they want with their hardware, and it's the most powerful computing device a consumer can generally purchase.
Smartphones and tablets are relatively new devices. As soon as the market is saturated and the technology matures, sales will drop off sharply, and you'll hear pundits moaning about the "demise" of those platforms as well. In fact, that's already happening with tablets, and I predict you'll start seeing the same thing with smartphones in another four or five years, maybe even sooner. Fewer and fewer people will be willing to purchase new phones every year or two in perpetuity.
Phones and tablets are much better consumer-level devices than PCs ever were. PCs are just moving into a new and arguably better niche as the most powerful line of computers for people who need or want to do more than a mobile device allows. The reason PC sales have dropped off considerably is that a) the worldwide market has been largely saturated, and b) computers have ridiculously powerful hardware for what most of them are required to do, so they don't need to be replaced nearly as often as they used to be.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
> Nintendo has historically used a customized version of OpenGL for their APIs, as has Sony
Please stop spreading that mis-information.
I shipped a couple Wii games and wrote an OpenGL wrapper. Nintendo's GX rendering library definitely was heavily OpenGL _inspired_ but it was not OpenGL.
I've also shipped PSX and PS2 games. At that same Wii job we also had an OpenGL wrapper for the PS2. Sony's sce*() calls for the Sony's PSX and PS2 was never OpenGL inspired.
Game devs don't really care. They'll use the API they have.
nVidia is (I believe) a Khronos founding member. They've always supported and contributed to DX and OpenGL.
DX survives because MS pushes it. They're the 800b gorilla with a monopoly over PC gamer operating systems and a strong share in the console market with the XBox One.