The Khronos Group weren’t within the list of publishers, developers and middleware partners that had announced their support for Nintendo Switch, but that has now changed.
The new home gaming system has now been listed as a conformant product with their Vulkan 1.0, OpenGL 4.5, and OpenGL ES 3.2 APIs.
It is Vulkan that has sparked the most excitement among developers, who now await more concrete news on Nintendo Switch’s innards before committing to bring their projects to the platform.
The cross-platform graphics and compute API has impressed the industry, with Oculus chief technology officer John Carmack commenting: “We have been using NVIDIA hardware and drivers on both Windows and Android for Vulkan development, and the reductions in CPU overhead have been impressive.”
With a custom NVIDIA Tegra processor powering Nintendo Switch, of which they previously shared: “The high-efficiency scalable processor includes an NVIDIA GPU based on the same architecture as the world’s top-performing GeForce gaming graphics cards.
“The Nintendo Switch’s gaming experience is also supported by fully custom software, including a revamped physics engine, new libraries, advanced game tools and libraries. NVIDIA additionally created new gaming APIs to fully harness this performance. The newest API, NVN, was built specifically to bring lightweight, fast gaming to the masses.
“Gameplay is further enhanced by hardware-accelerated video playback and custom software for audio effects and rendering. We’ve optimised the full suite of hardware and software for gaming and mobile use cases. This includes custom operating system integration with the GPU to increase both performance and efficiency.”
We will learn more in the Nintendo Switch Presentation 2017, which will take place on Friday 13th January.
