So are consoles holding back this game?

[Bishop81]

OK, What's that element of their toolkit called? I was quoting the OpenGL one since it's generally the most recognized alternative to DirectX, and has been used by Sony with both PS3 and PS4.

The underlying point I was making was that the hardware in the PS4 is just as DX11 capable as the majority of AMD GPus build in the last 3-4 uears and although it doesn't use MS DirectX11 specifically, the functionality is there and supported by the APIs/libraries supplied by Sony.

But, I'd be interested to know what they call the lower level interface you're describing, is it a PS4 variant of Mantle?

Did a little more digging. Turns out there are 2 APIs - your choice depending on how lazy you are. :P

GNM and GNMX according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlaySt...ystem_software).

More details from,

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/di...-playstation-4

Low-level access and the "wrapper" graphics API

In terms of rendering, there was some interesting news. Norden pointed out one of the principal weaknesses of DirectX 11 and OpenGL - they need to service a vast array of different hardware. The advantage of PlayStation 4 is that it's a fixed hardware platform, meaning that the specifics of the tech can be addressed directly. (It's worth pointing out at this point that the next-gen Xbox has hardware-specific extensions on top of the standard DX11 API.)

"We can significantly enhance performance by bypassing a lot of the artificial DirectX limitations and bottlenecks that are imposed so DirectX can work across a wide range of hardware," he revealed.

The development environment is designed to be flexible enough to get code up and running quickly, but offering the option for the more adventurous developers to get more out of the platform. To that end, PlayStation 4 has two rendering APIs.

"One of them is the absolute low-level API, you're talking directly to the hardware. It's used to draw the static RAM buffers and feed them directly to the GPU," Norden shared. "It's much, much lower level than you're used to with DirectX or OpenGL but it's not quite at the driver level. It's very similar if you've programmed PS3 or PS Vita, very similar to those graphics libraries."

But on top of that Sony is also providing what it terms a "wrapper API" that more closely resembles the standard PC rendering APIs.

The cool thing about the wrapper API is that while its task is to simplify development, Sony actually provides the source code for it so if there's anything that developers don't get on with, they can adapt it themselves to better suit their project.

[Kosmos992k]

Did a little more digging. Turns out there are 2 APIs - your choice depending on how lazy you are. :P

GNM and GNMX according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlaySt...ystem_software).

More details from,

Thanks. It sounds like the lower level APIs are doing similar things to what projects like Mantle attempt to achieve, except since PS4 is a fixed platform, it's much more closely tailored to the hardware in PS4

[Bishop81]

Thanks. It sounds like the lower level APIs are doing similar things to what projects like Mantle attempt to achieve, except since PS4 is a fixed platform, it's much more closely tailored to the hardware in PS4

More like Mantle is trying to do what console APIs have done for ages.

Even so I believe the likes of Mantle and DX12 will only be a halfway point between pre-12 DX/OpenGL and console APIs.

PS: Consoles frequently let you go to a very low level. N64 and PS2 let you rewrite the microcode even.

[Kosmos992k]

More like Mantle is trying to do what console APIs have done for ages.

Even so I believe the likes of Mantle and DX12 will only be a halfway point between pre-12 DX/OpenGL and console APIs.

PS: Consoles frequently let you go to a very low level. N64 and PS2 let you rewrite the microcode even.

I agree with you, I come from a time when developers worked at the binary level developing their games creating drivers for the specific platform that ran on the 'bare metal' so to speak. over time software started to abstract things further and further from the hardware to facilitate easy development, but of course also software bloat and horrible performance. Games have always been closer to the hardware, especially with consoles.

Perhaps I am showing my age, but I remember the old Atari systems using display list interrupts to re-write the data being sent to the screen more or less in flight to mix screen modes and access more colors than the screen memory should have allowed to be displayed. So, yeah, writing code at the hardware level will always be more efficient and produce better effects, so the closer you can get to the hardware the better. I'm pretty sure that similar techniques allowed PS2 to display GT4 in 1080i on the original phat PS2....

Either way, it always makes me cringe when I see people touting the latest DirectX release when low level drivers and APIs on the same hardware will always offer better performance, and as you say console have always worked at a lower level than PC software. Though in recent years, games have become so damned large, that many devs are leanig more on the SDKs and what they provide rather than venturing too close to the low level APIs. This though is why I expect that the PS4 (and XboxOne) will have longer lives and retain more relevance than equivalently specified PCs.