Re:iPhone 7
by TazeTSchnitzel on Wednesday September 07, 2016 @03:16PM
(#12446326)
It makes the old OpenGL/DirectX situation look great by comparison, doesn't it? Now there's three competing modern graphics APIs, and none works on every platform. At least OpenGL worked everywhere, if poorly.
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Aren't Vulkan, Direct X 12 and Metal much closer than Direct X pre 12 and Open GL ever were? The three are derived (at least in philosophy) from AMD's Mantle, not like Direct X pre 12 and Open GL that are (or at least were) very different beast.
I only ever programmed with OpenGL 1.3 and 1.4, so my knowledge is not very up-to-date to say the least...
Porting complexity is still non-trivial, and then you need people who understand multiple bare metal APIs.
The architectures are all based off Mantle, but OpenGL 3.3 and DX10 were very similar in their hay day, and porting was still fairly limited (you can still partially blame the horrible adoption of the 3.x series that took so long to take off).
OpenGL never worked on Xbox 360, and didn't work convincingly (for non-trivial games) on PS3.
Re:iPhone 7
by TazeTSchnitzel on Wednesday September 07, 2016 @04:32PM
(#12447340)
Consoles have always been a special case, though. For one thing, the entire API is usually under NDA, so a different graphics system is the least of your problems.