Nintendo's Switch Game Console Is Vulkan & OpenGL Conformant

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Nintendo's Switch Game Console Is Vulkan & OpenGL Conformant

Since Nintendo's Switch game console launch powered by the NVIDIA Tegra we have suspected they were making use of Vulkan as the graphics API, particularly with Nintendo joining The Khronos Group, now it's been pretty much firmed up...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nintendo-Switch-Vulkan-Conform

[Tomin]

Nice.

[AsuMagic]

Nintendo? Supporting a widespread standard?!

[MoonMoon]

Which basically means that Bethesda ported Skyrim to Nintendo OS using Vulkan, but still can't be bothered to port to Linux.

[dungeon]

Does that mean we will play new Mario on Linux? Of course not

[Brophen]

Doesn't that make it easy to emulate? Since the architecture is ARM and the API is Vulkan, I don't see how they are going to make it difficult. I'll be pleased if it is, just surprised

[AsuMagic]

Doesn't that make it easy to emulate? Since the architecture is ARM and the API is Vulkan, I don't see how they are going to make it hard

games that don't use vulkan, DRM (edit : and good luck emulating this CPU at full speed)

[Almindor]

Which basically means that Bethesda ported Skyrim to Nintendo OS using Vulkan, but still can't be bothered to port to Linux.

There's very little reason to port a game to linux. SteamOS is one tiny 1% marketshare one but Bethesda could care less.

I'm a linux fan, using linux exclusively on my personal machines for work and gaming (when possible).

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.
It's not worth it from any point of view. There's almost no revenue, it's problematic to keep it working cross distribution (unless open source) and there's bound to be a 10x more support issues coming from the platform with the way drivers and hw compatibility is right now, especially in the gfx cards space.

[FireBurn]

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

[birdie]

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.