Timothy Lottes (FXAA) on the new PlayStation and Xbox specs

I would think future updates to OpenGL/DX could allow more features of the cards to be used by devs. Otherwise, to use all the features of a card, the game would need to be heavily optimised which increases development time and costs, and then only supports a certain configuration which would be such a small amount of people that all that development wouldn't be worth it.

Many of these features are no doubt used by the driver author(s) to implement cool stuff in GL extensions. One particularly crazy example: https://developer.nvidia.com/nv-path-rendering

For the same reason a modern CPU has capabilities far beyond what's exposed through Javascript or Ruby: it's easier to build a simple general purpose device and then implement any API through a software layer than to make hardware implementation of every complex API.

It's not because of opengl or directx, it's because of the operating system layer.

A wonderful feature of Timothy Lottes' blog is a continuously updated list of blog articles from other graphics programmers down the right side.

http://blog.selfshadow.com/ has several great articles and a great blogroll.

Meanwhile, here are a few favorites: http://fgiesen.wordpress.com/ http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/ http://www.iquilezles.org/ http://0fps.wordpress.com/

A long long time ago back in the 64-bit era, a bunch of fellow conspirators got some of the videogaming news sites to wax poetic about the impending arrival of Super Multi-Uniform Rational F-Splines...

The more things change, the more they stay the same...

That's not the xbox leak that the present specs are from. I've managed to confirm the newest leak (8 Jaguar cores, 4MB L2, 12 GCN CU, 8GB DDR3, 32MB fast local pool) from a guy who works on a game for it and who I trust.