Nintendo's Switch Game Console Is Vulkan & OpenGL Conformant

[AsuMagic]

It's based on the Maxwell arch so it's not 100% Vulkan compliant - I mean in theory it is, in practice many things will be implemented in software and consequently they will be very slow/more or less unusable. Even Pascal is not 100% implemented in hardware in regard to Vulkan/D3D12 but at least it's much much better than Maxwell.

source?

[Michael]

I'm surprised the driver isn't compliant with Vulkan 1.0.38, version 1.0.1 was from 9 months ago

The numbers on that page are about the Vulkan-CTS version, not the Vulkan API version. Vulkan CTS is on 1.0.1.2.

[oooverclocker]

Nintendo? Supporting a widespread standard?!

Wii U: fail.
Handheld devices: threatened by smart phones and tablets.
Mature consoles market: already occupied by PS4/Xbox

Dropping the TV console and offering a TV docking station for the new handheld with Vulkan support driven by a cheap Tegra X1(20nm) solution is simply a logical decision to bring more third party games to one single platform while being able to keep the prices cheap for the masses and kids that can live with visuals around high end smartphone/tablet level(e.g. iPhone 7).

Especially smart phones and tablets will be the Nintendo killer at some time so I guess they will have to change their business completely after some years and perhaps develop Mario games for app stores...

[droste]

[...]Especially smart phones and tablets will be the Nintendo killer at some time so I guess they will have to change their business completely after some years and perhaps develop Mario games for app stores...

https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/super-mario-run/id1145275343?mt=8

[johnc]

It's based on the Maxwell arch so it's not 100% Vulkan compliant - I mean in theory it is, in practice many things will be implemented in software and consequently they will be very slow/more or less unusable. Even Pascal is not 100% implemented in hardware in regard to Vulkan/D3D12 but at least it's much much better than Maxwell.

oh no not this again

[Min1123]

If I was asked by Bethesda or any other game company if they should port a game to Linux I'd say a big fat NO.

I understand your opinion on this, but I have a different one. Porting a game, especially in-house, allows your code to be more portable, and allows you to find bugs that are far more vocal on one platform than another. Case in point, XP to Vista. XP had horrible memory management, and it would let any program touch any memory it wanted to. Vista came out and introduced the Windows version of a segfault for going out of the assigned memory space. Many Windows programming shops interpreted this as a problem with Vista, when it was actually that their random pointer errors sometimes pointed to a thing that allowed the program to keep going and Vista didn't allow that anymore.

Additionally, abstraction layers like SDL2 have helped many games become more stable and rely on less custom code for OS interaction and were implemented during porting to another OS.

[oooverclocker]

BTW Linux desktop market share is 2.3%, just not with Steam installed and you all know why. Chicken-and-egg...

[davidbepo]

and it's also an extremely underperformant tegra

[Holograph]

(edit : and good luck emulating this CPU at full speed)

They might have used some decent hardware this time, but personally I don't think it should be regarded positively either way. The problem is that while it's possible to make great games with crap hardware as Nintendo has literally always done (all of their consoles have been low-end, hardware-wise), most third-party publishers have moved away from exclusive titles for one console. Consumers and thus publishers want cross-platform software and it's still going to be difficult with Nintendo hardware because it won't have the same power as the other options on the market (PS4, XBone, PC).

All that said, however, it's at least good news that they will use some standards. At least it can help publishers more easily bring previous-generation games to it.

[DMJC]

It's easy to support many distros with one build on Linux. Ship your libraries with your application. It's been a solved issue since Loki started shipping games in 1999. The hard to support many distros argument is an argument that's made in ignorance of the development process. This is a solved issue.