So are consoles holding back this game?

[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.