I work at a major games publisher and literally all we care about is DirectX for PC/X1 ports, and the weird graphics library we use for PS4. I don't know of any game released by us in last 10 years which even had an OpenGL backend. From what I gathered from our graphics devs, their reaction to vulkan was "meh, it's nice but we already have PC covered with DirectX which we have to write for X1 anyway, and it's not like PS4 is going to support it, so what's the point?"
That's a pretty bad reaction, and also highlights the absence of good cross platform development in your studio, because of lack of common tools. You should release your games for Linux for a change.
But this also highlights, that pragmatic value of cross platform tools is apparent when they are really cross platform. I.e. the wider is their availability, the higher is their value. OpenGL didn't quite reach that, because of opposition from lock-in minded companies. So this is a welcome change in Nintendo's approach, because it advances Vulkan as a cross platform API.
Yes, I also think Nvidia played a key role in it. They saved time on reinventing the wheel with their Tegra chip and used existing Vulkan driver for it. At the same time, why can't AMD do the same with others? They should convince Sony to use Vulkan in the new PS#.
It doesn't make it any easier. They (AMD) need to do double work (implementing another driver). And someone has to pay for it. It's an expense and time wasting which can be avoided if they'd have used Vulkan.
I'm skeptical that AMD would implement the API and driver for a console. That's sounds like platform work, and I think that would make it the console manufacturer's job. AMD might say "here's the chip's specs and we support API X and Y for it", and if Sony or MS don't like it, they can change it themselves.
> I'm skeptical that AMD would implement the API and driver for a console. That's sounds like platform work, and I think that would make it the console manufacturer's job.
AMD make GPUs for both Xbox and PlayStation. It's very probable, that they are writing drivers for them, as well as supporting APIs implementatinos. They follow requirements from Sony and MS naturally, but they do the heavy lifting.
And if you are right, and someone like AMD don't do anything besides providing the documentation, Nintendo are actually being smart there. Instead of wasting time and money on reinventing the wheel, they use existing high quality driver and API implementation from Nvidia. It's a win win for everyone.
