You have these small devices which are limited by their power consumption and heat generation. OpenGL ES is the bane of our existence there, because it not only has a lot of overhead, but it has all that overhead on the platform where you can least afford it. We’re happy to see Apple leading the way with mobile devices. DirectX 12 is an attempt to create a low-level rendering API for the next version of Windows. Microsoft and Sony have similar low-level APIs on their consoles. Sweeney: Yes, Mantle is another low-level API. GamesBeat: Do you see this as something like AMD’s Mantle, a similar effort to what they’ve done? Or is it different in some way? We’ll see an immediate, significant improvement in the number of objects and the complexity of the scenes they can build without having to do constant work themselves. The game engine is doing all the work of translating it to a graphics API. The great thing is, developers using a game engine, they’re writing very high-level code for their game logic anyway. Metal achieves about a tenfold decrease in driver overhead. It doesn’t let developers to the low-level management of resources that they need to achieve efficiency. It has a very high-level view of the scene. Sweeney: There’s just a huge amount of overhead introduced by OpenGL into the graphics pipeline. GamesBeat: In what way was that showing its age? It replaces OpenGL ES, which is an ancient relic of the Silicon Graphics era. It shields developers from the very low-level implementation details. Metal is a low-level rendering API, which means it provides the absolute minimum layer of software needed to support multiple versions of different graphics chips. GamesBeat: If I understand correctly, now a developer can write directly to Metal, and the game engines do the work of translating that so you can run on something else besides that hardware. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview. Epic’s demo (here at 99:30) will be available free for developers after iOS 8 comes out. Instead, game developers can use game engines from Unity, Epic Games, and Crytek to create games that can be 10 times more efficient in rendering via Metal. The demo took advantage of a new low-level rendering applications programming interface, Metal, which gets rid of the aging and code-bloated OpenGL ES API.
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