Low Level APIs On PS4 & Xbox One Will Suffer From Diversity On PC – Dev

GamingBolt recently caught up with Focus Home Interactive’s Sylvain Séchi to talk about the publisher’s upcoming Blood Bowl 2. During our conversation, GamingBolt was able to ask about upcoming APIs on PC and consoles. Vulkan and DirectX 12 are expected to change things radically in the PC space. Will this mean that gaming PCs will finally catch up with innovations in the console space and can PC sustain more than one API?

“The graphics API panel is certainly evolving at a very quick pace these last few years, and it’s going to keep evolving quickly (DirectX12 iterations, Vulcan,..),” says Sylvain. However Sylvain believes that this diversity on the PC gaming side of things might affect consoles and it will depend from developer to developer on how they write their code. “However, the PC hardware is still very different from the consoles as it’s much more diverse. Therefore, low level APIs like those available on consoles will still suffer from this diversity and optimization will depend on how specific the code will be.”

Sylvain has a point since the APIs on consoles already have the ability to allow programmers to code close to the metal. Vulkan and DirectX 12 will bring in big changes for PC games development scene but the console scene will probably remain unaffected.