Hi guys,

I don't even know it is the right place to post my question, but.. lets go.

I was wondering if all the platforms supports DirectX and or OpenGL.

Let try me clarify my doubts:

I know the Windows support DirectX ( also support OpenGL), as do XBOX and Windows Phone ( maybe ).

As far as I know, the other platforms like: MacOS X, iOS ( iPhone, iPad, etc ), Android, Linux, etc supports OpenGL ( or OpenGL ES for mobiles ).

But, how about PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4? Play Station Vita? Wii, Game Cube, Nintendo 3DS etc etc etc?

What is its drawing API? It support some kind of OpenGL? There is other drawing APIs for consoles? Some proprietary API for each platform?

I know the most engines will convert code to platform native code, like Unity3d, you write your game with Unity and it compile your code and generate all the native code ( or something like that ) for iPhone, Xbox, PS, etc... but.. I want to know at low level... what Unity like engines use to convert code to platform specific?

And if you use something like 'PlayStatin SDK' ( I dont even know if it exists ), how do you develop your graphics?

Well, thanks in advance for any replies.

ps: Sry about my english, I am not a native speaker/writer.

Thanks for your reply Zaoshi!!

So, its a good idea to write a 'wrapper' layer to graphics API if you want to write a cross platform game engine... right? :)

Someone who use Playstation SDK and/or some 'Nintendo SDK' may share some knowledge??

Thanks!! :D

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSGL

Humm, interesting... with the names given by ATEFred I was able to research something ( 'googled it' ) and found some references to LibGCM for PS3...
It is a derivation from OpenGL ES 1.0 as far as I was able to find... so... its a 'OpenGL like' library... with its differences I imagine, but no something complete new...

As linked above, you're talking about PSGL, not GCM. GCM is the native API. PSGL is a wrapper around GCM, which makes it look more like a GL-like API.

I am a bit curious about what cannot be 'disclosed' for now as pcmaster says...

Whenever you're working with private SDKs, you have to sign a non-disclosure agreement, which basically means that in exchange for access to these tools, you have to treat them as being top-secret. Breaching the secrecy agreements will get your company's licence revoked, and/or yourself fired.

In general, developers have much lower-level access to graphics programming constructs than on less-specialized platforms like PCs, tablets, or smartphones. So, rather than having an API which gives you nice calls for drawing collections of vertices and which takes care of graphics memory management and threading in its own special way (in conjunction with the OS, Drivers and Hardware), instead you get to do things like building raw command-lists and DMA'ing them to the GPU, and being responsible for managing graphics memory on your own, and ensuring all your threads play nice together. Its this free-wheeling quality, together with less abstraction overhead that allows game consoles to perform several times better than would a PC with identical hardware.

AMD's upcoming Mantle API is supposed to bring many of these abilities to the PC-space, although Mantle will necessarily have to play well with the OS/driver model, and pay a higher--although less than D3D or OpenGL--abstraction penalty than consoles do. I expect the mantle programming model to fall somewhere just past the mid-point between PC APIs and console-style APIs, and performance benefit to fall at about the same. I also expect that such a model is much more difficult to grok than D3D or OpenGL for the average graphics programmer, and that the naive graphics programmer will be able to shoot himself in the foot with far more frequency than with D3D or OpenGL--so performance wins will in no way be guaranteed.