The PS4 and Xbox1 both are literally built on top of DirectX11, meaning that games for next-gen consoles (read: AAA) will be DirectX by DEFAULT but will certainly not be OpenGL by default.
And OpenGL is a requirement for Linux support of these games.
How Valve is strong arming manufacturers into writing the graphics code for their games in BOTH frameworks is beyond me. I'm not sure the major engines out there support both either.
But Microsoft won a massive coup this generation with all consoles being Win7 developer kits + Visual Studio 2012 + DirectX 11.
With Microsoft providing the major tools for AAA-games, it's going to be harder going forward, not easier, for the Linux proponents to make their case and win.
As other have pointed out, you are obviously wrong about Microsoft Direct X being available on Sony's Playstation 4.
But you are also wrong in the larger picture. Direct3D and OpenGL are first and foremost abstraction layers to access the GPU. Since in a console the hardware is immutable, you can gain a lot of performance by skipping (or trimming the fat of) these abstractions.
The XBox 360 version of DirectX is very different from the PC version: it's much much closer to the metal and exposes pretty much all the GPU functionalities.
There's no reason to think that it will be any different for the XBox One. Hardware-wise it's a very average PC: its sole advantage versus an actual PC is this ability to get that much closer to the metal.
Most major engines, such as Unreal/UDK, already allow export to Linux and consoles, so what the console supports isn't the limiting factor it was when everyone had to code directly to the metal.
"Sony is building its CPU on what it's calling an extended DirectX 11.1+ feature set, including extra debugging support that is not available on PC platforms. This system will also give developers more direct access to the shader pipeline than they had on the PS3 or through DirectX itself. "This is access you're not used to getting on the PC, and as a result you can do a lot more cool things and have a lot more access to the power of the system," Norden said. A low-level API will also let coders talk directly with the hardware in a way that's "much lower-level than DirectX and OpenGL," but still not quite at the driver level."
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/sony-dives-deep-into-t...
Is what I was going on, but I can see that "DirectX feature set" is not the same as "DirectX", so I apologize for misleading.
Both PS4 and Xbox One are now on the X86 architecture. They also share the same GPU (with minor differences).
PS4 runs a BSD derived OS with a Sony-specific graphics library called RSX (very similar to OpenGL, but much lower level).
Xbox 360 and PS3 games threw away the fixed function graphics pipeline. Everything was done with shaders. With Linux graphics drivers nearing OpenGL3 compliance, it is much more feasible to target Linux in addition to Windows and Consoles without needing to re-architect the graphics architecture of your engine.
It will be trivial for next-gen developers to target PC/PS4/Xbox One/SteamBox.
Some clever folks might even be able to compile once and dynamically link against platform-specific graphics/platform libraries. :)
edit: this was directed at criley2 - not McGlockenshire
Isn't RSX (Reality Simulator) was just a name for nvidia graphic chipset in PS3? Oh wait, it is.
PS3 used libGCM and PSGL, which is pretty much OpenGL ES 1.1 + Nvidia Cg. Don't forget the fact that OpenGL ES isn't OpenGL.
XBox never used DirectX neither, because why would you need such abstraction if all of your target market has the exact same hardware inside? (I'm omitting fact that guy above compared Direct X and OpenGL which is retarded). It used something similar, but not the same.
I certainly did confuse the RSX (ps3 GPU) with libGCM (the ps3 GPU library). I haven't forgotten that OpenGL ES isn't OpenGL - it's OpenGL minus all of the garbage.
It's also true that Xbox 360 did not use DirectX. But they DID have an abstraction in the form of the XDK (Xbox 360 SDK).
Comparing OpenGL and DirectX is not retarded - they are both competing graphics libraries that are slowly converging on the same feature set.
The PS4 and Xbox1 both are literally built on top of DirectX11, meaning that games for next-gen consoles (read: AAA) will be DirectX by DEFAULT but will certainly not be OpenGL by default.
And OpenGL is a requirement for Linux support of these games.
How Valve is strong arming manufacturers into writing the graphics code for their games in BOTH frameworks is beyond me. I'm not sure the major engines out there support both either.
But Microsoft won a massive coup this generation with all consoles being Win7 developer kits + Visual Studio 2012 + DirectX 11.
With Microsoft providing the major tools for AAA-games, it's going to be harder going forward, not easier, for the Linux proponents to make their case and win.