Seattle-area consultant and co-owner at Binomial LLC, game and open source developer, graphics programmer, lossless data and texture compression specialist, and recovering OpenGL addict. Worked previously at Digital Illusions, Microsoft Ensemble Studios, Valve, Boss Fight Entertainment, and Unity Technologies.
Wednesday, June 4, 2014
Apple Metal API
Apple (a Khronos Group "promoter" member) "is introducing a new 3D API called Metal, which takes the place of OpenGL, allowing games to get ’10x’ faster draw rates":
How long before Google jumps into this fight, or the Khronos Group releases a fork of OGL to respond? Maybe they could combine Metal + Mantle and develop a new API -- Mental. ;)
AFAIK S3 came up with a similarly-named API back in the 90s called MeTaL, to which Epic supported in Unreal and UT99 alongside Glide, DirectX and software rendering. The API didn't catch on but S3TC later became the basis for DXT.
Heck yeah! I had that S3 Savage 2000 card back in the day that defined the standard for much-improved textures via texture compression. My friends were jealous of me at the time for running Unreal Tournament with such detailed graphics on the S3 MeTaL API. Fortunately, its flagship feature, S3TC, became standard in Direct X 6.0 and an OpenGL update (1.3)
How long before Google jumps into this fight, or the Khronos Group releases a fork of OGL to respond? Maybe they could combine Metal + Mantle and develop a new API -- Mental. ;)
ReplyDeleteAFAIK S3 came up with a similarly-named API back in the 90s called MeTaL, to which Epic supported in Unreal and UT99 alongside Glide, DirectX and software rendering. The API didn't catch on but S3TC later became the basis for DXT.
ReplyDeleteHeck yeah! I had that S3 Savage 2000 card back in the day that defined the standard for much-improved textures via texture compression. My friends were jealous of me at the time for running Unreal Tournament with such detailed graphics on the S3 MeTaL API. Fortunately, its flagship feature, S3TC, became standard in Direct X 6.0 and an OpenGL update (1.3)
Delete