Nitrous Engine Dev On PS4 API And Vulkan Support, PS4’s Additional Compute Units Pre-empts Work

The Nitrous Engine, created by Oxide Games, has been rather interesting over the past year or so. This is due to Oxide using it for Ashes of the Singularity, the first DirectX 12-focused title available, and creating some wondrous visuals with the same. GamingBolt spoke to Dan Baker, Tim Kipp and Brian Wade of Oxide Games to weigh in on several facets regarding Nitrous, including its use on the PS4.

Having spoken to Brad Wardell earlier about Sony using Vulcan on PS4, we asked the team about the advantages this could create with regards to Nitrous. “From our standpoint, writing a back-end for PS4 is a few months cost and then we’re done. I think it’s a better move for Sony because that means people can invest money in API and it will work everywhere. It will be a lot easier for them to put their code onto.”

As for the GPGPU of the PS4 having wider computer and more ALU utilization for Nitrous, we asked the team’s take on the GPGPU for both consoles. “The PS4 has more synchronous compute queues which could allow you to develop more dependency  with gameplay. You could preempt work.” However the developers admitted they could give a better answer but they can’t due to obvious reasons.

What are your thoughts on this? Let us know in the comments and stay tuned for our full interview the Nitrous Engine team in the coming days.