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Comment by socalgal2 | Hacker News Reader

Filament is not a console grade renderer, not even close. It's architectured around GL. Yes, it can use Vulkan but it's not in any way optimized like a console engine.

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What is a console grade renderer? Specifically, what's considered table stakes and what is Filament missing?

GL is way more optimized then Vulkan style rendering on most devices today. If you speed test WebGL2 with WebGPU on a mobile device the difference is huge for rendering a simple PBR model.

This is a very interesting but also frustrating comment. If you're right that it's not a console grade renderer (not that I know what that even means) then that's really interesting - but why not? And could it be in future or is it fundamentally impossible for some reason?

Maybe they mean like the golden era of Xbox 360 rendering. Where the CPU and GPU could run together in one region of unified 512MB of memory with crazy fast rendering bandwidth. I wish there was a VR headset designed like that.

There is a hell of a lot more to a AAA+ game engine than just the renderer, to begin with.

I understand what your intent is in saying this, and I agree with the intent, but for onlookers, you don't really need a lot to make a good game and this would likely be just fine. I don't actually know if it's possible to ship GL games on modern consoles now that it's in-fashion to have your own proprietary graphics library. That said, the way Google has factored the back-end of the renderer, it won't take a PhD to target one of those GPU APIs.

Aside: GL is still a good practical choice for games built by small teams.

I guess it depends. There's no reason to promote this as "console grade" unless "console grade" means something more than, plain old 3d object renderer.

Certainly, you could define a console as an NES and the claim "console grade" but I'm guessing they are claiming "console grade" means, competitive with the renderer in games like Battlefield 6, Elden Ring, Horizon Forbidden West, etc.. Filiment is not up to those tasks.

Yes, you can make great games without the features of top console game graphics engines. But again, there's no reason for the hyperbole of putting "console grade" in the description then.

Yeah, it’s salesmanship. My feeling is that some amount of salesmanship is fine. This pales in comparison to a lot of promotion we see today. I mean this genuinely; maybe my standards have fallen too low? Perhaps I’m getting numb to it.

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