logoalt Hacker News

grishkayesterday at 12:50 AM1 replyview on HN

> OpenGL never was a big thing on game consoles.

I've never tried developing anything for a 3D-capable console, but I've always had the feeling that their graphics APIs are bespoke, thin abstraction layers on top of the raw graphics hardware just so you don't have to poke the GPU registers directly.


Replies

pjmlpyesterday at 7:05 AM

Yes, they are quite low level, hence how painful Vulkan happens to be, as its design was driven by console vendors feedback, and based on Mantle, basically AMD trying to make a PC API close to how modern consoles work.

https://github.com/sigmaco/mantle-docs

https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/466/amd...

While there have some support, Playstation 3 had OpenGL ES 1.0 with Cg for shading, Wii had a GL like API with GLSL subset, and SWitch does support GL 4.6/Vulkan, they were never fully adopted by devs, rather favouring the native ones.