Reply to post: Re: Linux on PS4

Re: Linux on PS4

I'm going to share some engineering knowledge about why AMD is vastly superior for consoles and why their hardware was chosen. This is very well known by engineers who work with these things. In very simple English, AMD is the very best manufacturer for high performing, low level graphics API gaming. When the "operating system" steps out of the way and drivers are a non-factor, AMD hardware outperforms Nvidia hardware and Nvidia has a lot of work to do before their hardware will be competitive in this market. AMD is generally thought of to have excellent hardware engineers and very bad software engineers because their drivers are bad on "high-level" APIs but extremely fast on "low level" APIs. I'll explain what that means here... Between a graphics card and a game exists two layers of software: (1) hardware driver, (2) graphics processing API. Drivers are not magic and are things we're mostly familiar with but the graphics processing API might be a new terminology for you so I will briefly explain what it is. An API can be for something called DirectX 10 or it can be for something called OpenGL 3.1, these are different graphics related APIs. An API is the final interface between a game's actual code and the driver. Drivers are written to support very specific versions of graphics APIs. While a single driver from a graphics card manufacturer might support DirectX 11 really well, it might also have very poor support for OpenGL. The story of what an API is gets more complicated when we factor in the difference between "high" and "low" level API. A game written for a "high level" API requires the driver to be very intricately programmed. A game written for a "low level" API requires the game to be intricately detailed to directly use and manage hardware resources and the driver to be a simple pipeline right to the raw hardware. AMD's hardware engineering is superior to Nvidia's for a low level API, so their hardware will be chosen for gaming consoles. AMD software drivers for a platform like Windows DirectX 9, 10, or 11 is inferior to Nvidia's, so they do not outperform Nvidia on high level APIs. DirectX12 and Vulkan are low level APIs, and AMD outperforms Nvidia on those as expected.