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Switch officially supports Vulkan and OpenGL 4.5, certified by Khronos.
- Thread starter jmga
- Start date
BigEmil
Junior Member
Yeah but the overall process to port it to Switch will be slightly easier that's all, better than their previous ways for third party porting atleast and Nintendo need to do all they can do ease it for third parties unless they wanna be like third party support for Wii U again
ethomaz
Banned
Most gaming consoles supports OpenGL.... all Nintendo, all PlayStation, etc.
Only MS didn't support it at software level because the hardware support it too.
It's probably going to be worse than Wii U. The Wii U was at least on par/superior for a year or two. They have swapped one issue for another.
Hero of Legend
Member
I'm pretty certain Sony systems used OpenGL (hell didn't Nintendo systems do so already?), but what levels of OpenGL and whatnot were they?
Also would Vulkan have been possible on Wii U, or even 3DS, or is it a modern thing that only systems of about PS4 and XBO in power would be capable of supporting, ala UE4?
Also would Vulkan have been possible on Wii U, or even 3DS, or is it a modern thing that only systems of about PS4 and XBO in power would be capable of supporting, ala UE4?
Hero of Legend
Member
But Wii was NEVER close to PS3 and 360 and came out a year after 360 and right alongside PS3, and it got pretty decent support (not fantastic, but with some cool exclusives and occasional ports like of COD, it was good).
Nothing can be worse than Wii U, aside from the obvious like Virtual Boy and whatnot.
Edit: DP, sorry...
The cost of developing bespoke software for Switch will be much higher than it was for Wii and COD was one of the only downports the Wii got.
That's without mentioning the fact that most Nintendo focused developers of the past are now asset houses or shut altogether.
Hero of Legend
Member
The loss of Hudson still hurts.
Still, I would have to imagine Switch being the easiest Nintendo system to develop for alongside the competition since the GC. Switch at least has modern engine support and tech in it, even if the numbers are low. This ain't PowerPC anymore.
yeah but no sane dev would ever use opengl on playstation, and I suspect the same is true for nintendo.
You really have no idea what you're talking about.
I know enough to know the Wii U wasn't anywhere from 6 to 10 times less powerful than the PS3 and 360. Switch is compared to PS4 and Xbox One. There's no secret sauce that is going to close that gap.
Franz Brötchen
Banned
Yup, just proved that you don't actually know what was going on. The WiiU could have been quite a bit beefier and still development would've been a hassle compared to what will apparently come via Switch. Architecture plays a great role, how else do you explain the difference between Bayonetta 1 on 360 vs PS3?
No, because that's terrible.
It's between 60% and 30% of the Xbox One in FP32 docked depending on the SM's at the given clocks.
However you have to take into account the architectural advantage Nvidia has along with the possibility of using FP16 for some effects to make that gap smaller.
Franz Brötchen;226883521 said:
Bayonetta PS3 was outsourced.
Also as Sho_Nuff linked to this old thread http://m.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=469109 I thought it was relevant. Devs that were badmouthing Wii U said the architecture was simple and it was easy to port to.
Edit:
Everything has to run in portable mode which is ~150 Gflops which is a lot less than 30% of the XBO. The architecture advantage isn't going to be massive either, the current gen machine are only three years old.
Even on modern AMD GPU's Nvidia has a notable architectural advantage. And running in the portable mode I think would hardly be a constraint given how perfect the power scales between 720p and 1080p. Subnative is also a possibility.
Franz Brötchen
Banned
Weeeeellll, why was it outsourced, hm? That's exactly my point. PS3's idiotically complicated internals that did nothing for them save for nearly bankrupting them (slightly exaggerated) during their first 2 years, are the reason it had to be outsourced. You actually had to learn dealing with it and gained nothing from it for titles outside PS3. Exactly the kind of time wasted on completely separated architectures in 3DS and WiiU and Nintendo will profit enormously from far easier development, as will the few 3rd party titles that come voluntarily/are moneyhatted.
How low are we going this rabbithole? Nintendoomed?
A lot of XBO games are already 900p or lower. How subnative are we going? 480p?
480p looks fine on the gamepad.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
A good deal of titles are outsourced in this industry for various practical purposes.
Funny how the first bolded paragraph by said developer was proven wrong by a few competent ps360 up-ports were exactly the GPU was shown superior (NFS:MW, Trine2). /tangential
Actually there are other things beyond architectures that could make a platform a hard target and wiiU was not simple to port to thanks to a very raw toolchain that nintendo handed out to devs. But sure - CPU-FLOPS-heavy ps360 tiles had issue porting to the wiiU CPU. Other than that, wiiU was superior in every way, and entirely different things stopped devs from finding home on the platform. Welcome to 2012.
It's downsampled and on 480p screen. Not subnative. A lot of people would disagree too.
I would disagree with their disagreement. Subnative also looks fine on the Vita.
thechristoph
Sir!
So is this a good thing or a bad thing? Apparently the Switch is street trash now. I need help deciding if I'm going to have fun playing video games on this video game toy.
No. Most gaming consoles have their own rendering SDK. They MIGHT offer OpenGL or OpenGL ES as an alternative for easier porting but the feature set is usually very limited. PS3's OpenGL ES is fixed function for example.
Very good.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
It's not just good, it's paramount for establishing a healthy ecosystem in the long term.
Sony and Nintendo have supported OpenGL in the past in varying ways. Sony's own PSGL and GNMX are based on OpenGL, but they don't support full, conformant OpenGL (search Sony on this page and you won't find anything). They have supported some form of OpenGL ES, but if you do a similar search for Sony on their OpenGL ES page you'll notice that all references to them are the form of "Piglet for PlayStation® 4", "Piglet for PlayStation® Vita", "Piglet for Linux", etc., which would lead me to guess that they're actually doing something like running in a GNMX wrapper rather than natively, so I don't know the performance you'd get trying to run an OpenGL ES renderer on PS4 or Vita.
Nintendo has apparently supported OpenGL of some variety with their previous consoles and OpenGL ES with 3DS, but you'll notice that none of them are listed on Khronos's conformant product pages, so there's no guarantee that any given OpenGL code would actually run on them, and apparently performance was pretty terrible if you strayed from Nintendo's GX API family (which again are based on OpenGL, but lower level).
The fact that Nintendo has gone as far as getting Switch certified as conformant for Vulkan, OpenGL and OpenGL ES is pretty good news. What it means is that if you've got a rendering path written in Vulkan, OpenGL or OpenGL ES (and aren't using any vendor-specific extensions), then it'll run on Switch. There's no guarantee that it'll run well, but it substantially reduces the "time until you actually see stuff on screen" for developers working with one of these three APIs (which is a lot of developers). OpenGL and OpenGL ES are important too, as ES is used by the vast majority of mobile games, and OpenGL is used by many indie developers who want a single cross-platform API (all those indie games you see popping up on Linux and MacOS, for example). The fact that Nvidia tends to have very good OpenGL drivers would bode well for the performance of these games as well. It won't compete with well-optimised Vulkan renderers, but those kinds of games are rarely pushing the technological envelope anyway.
Toadthemushroom
Member
For reference, the 3DS:
How likely is Nintendo going to allow for direct register access for Switch like they did DS (GTA had a lot of code written in assembly) and 3DS (Ironfall)? As far as I understand it, Switch software is going to be a lot more "portable" in the sense that it won't be tied to a specific hardware configuration, and I'm guessing if they go from ARM v8 to a new architecture on the CPU or adopt Volta for a new Switch, that'd break compatibility with such games?
How likely is Nintendo going to allow for direct register access for Switch like they did DS (GTA had a lot of code written in assembly) and 3DS (Ironfall)? As far as I understand it, Switch software is going to be a lot more "portable" in the sense that it won't be tied to a specific hardware configuration, and I'm guessing if they go from ARM v8 to a new architecture on the CPU or adopt Volta for a new Switch, that'd break compatibility with such games?
Great news that Vulkan is supported.
All the news seem to point that it really is great API.
All decent games used GCM, which can be thought as a father of modern low level APIs like Vulkan/DX12/GNM.
Ps4 has GNM which is low level API and GNMX is the fallback AP, for those who do not want to delve into the depths of hardware.
Expect all higher performance games to use GNM.
All the news seem to point that it really is great API.
Ps3 had a PSGL which was based on Opengl ES, It really wasn't properly supported.
All decent games used GCM, which can be thought as a father of modern low level APIs like Vulkan/DX12/GNM.
Ps4 has GNM which is low level API and GNMX is the fallback AP, for those who do not want to delve into the depths of hardware.
Expect all higher performance games to use GNM.
Support and to have an API that someone wants to use are quite different things.
ethomaz
Banned
Of course it is better to use a more low level API with better SDK tools support.
But there are few exceptions of gaming running in OpenGL on these consoles.
My point is you can run OpenGL code in most consoles even it not being optimal... Switch support is a no surprise.
dr_rus
Member
Haven't you heard? DX12 is better. It's all over for Nintendo, they are doomed.
While dx12 is better this is still nice. Just like Android supporting Vulcan and Apple doing their own thing.
I wonder what justification or reason people have for making this statement.
Diablohead
Member
Personally from my limited experiance the only thing I have seen DX12 benefit from is the Dolphin emulator, every game I have tried which had DX12 had slight improvements, windows store games hardly feel like they benefit from it at all.
Will it be beneficial for the Switch to use stuff like GPU compute?
Because I thought the whole point of keeping the CPU clock speed the same when switching between docked and portable mode, was that the game logic would always perform the same. Though I guess they can use it for visual-only related calculations.
Because I thought the whole point of keeping the CPU clock speed the same when switching between docked and portable mode, was that the game logic would always perform the same. Though I guess they can use it for visual-only related calculations.
Toadthemushroom
Member
Yeah, I think that's the case for Nintendo and Nvidia going for more streaming multiprocessors, which would also explain the active cooling even in portable mode. Nintendo's traditionally favoured bigger GPUs over CPUs, which is also the direction Sony and MS went with current gen.
On a related note, did any devs even use the Wii U's GPGPU capabilities? I remember Iwata mentioning it back in September 2012.
Makes sense. the main point of those low level APIs is to reduce CPU overhead; but basically no game is CPU limited on PC if you have a machine from this decade; but emulators are
Purple Cheeto
Member
The Switch has better OpenGL compatibility than macOS and iOS.
I think it's primarily an indication of MS having more and more effective marketing than the Khronos group. (as you would expect)
OrbitalBeard
Member
It's like you're competing with Malo as the most wishy-washy user on NintendoGAF. Stop being so dramatic.
LordKasual
Banned
Good news
Not good enough to offset the bad news that is its horsepower
Not good enough to offset the bad news that is its horsepower
You know I was joking, right? Also, outside of Doom and The Talos Principle, Vulkan is really a non-starter.
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that Vulkan is here. It brings competition and show MS that not everything needs to be locked down but it really hasn't made waves yet.
That is also the same with Vulkan. DX11 is still King/Queen.
Croteam said The Talos Principle runs faster with Vulkan after drivers have matured a bit during last months.
I already acknowledged The Talos Principle, jmga. Do we have a definitive DX12 vs Vulkan video, benchmarks or anything? I'm interested in the progress of Vulkan.
Probably due to 1) Apple not shipping hardware worth a damn on desktop in years and 2) insisting on maintaining their own crusty out of date branches of everything.
Same as when people say "why don't they switch to Unreal Engine 4?". Engine/API marketing is also marketed towards the consumer base along with direct-to-developer marketing. There are a bunch of people that think DirectX exists outside of MS hardware.