Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

While switch supports OpenGL and Vulkan, in practice very little games use it. The native API on Switch is a proprietary API called NVN.

OpenGL on Apple is on life support to support existing software, Apple platforms are all in on Metal now.

The only platforms where OpenGL and Vulkan are first class citizens is Linux, Android and Windows (barely). And Vulkan is still second fiddle to DirectX on Windows.



All fair points. However, I was taking issue specifically with the claim that the "Gaming industry is mostly using DirectX or Gnm/PSSL".

It would be hard to quantify exactly how much of it is using OpenGL, as a percentage.

However, for a very rough upper bound I quickly looked up these:

* Mobile gaming apparently makes 52% of the entire gaming market in 2023

* Android is 78% of mobile gaming

That could mean OpenGL makes up to 40% of the entire gaming market just from Android.

Although I have no idea what percentage of Android games use OpenGL and wouldn't know how to look that up. I also don't know how accurate those percentages are. I got them from brief Google queries and got both the 52% and 78% figures from the featured snippet.

But even if that 40% is much too high, we still need to add switch and PC games and I would find a figure of 30% of the gaming industry using openGL to be believable. That would put OpenGL as the largest API which I didn't expect, even as a possibility.


Just to reiterate on this point: Pretty much every Vulkan game on Windows forgoes using Vulkan Swapchains in favor of presenting from compute and using native DXGI Swapchains. If you are shipping a production quality game or application, you really want to use the platforms native APIs to get the full capabilities.


Interesting, like which games? I know RDR2 uses normal Vulkan swapchains.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: