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Nintendo joins Khronos vid API standards body

Pledges allegiance to the Vulkan

Nintendo has become the latest big name to join the Khronos Group, the standards group that manages graphics APIs like WebGL, OpenGL, and Vulkan.

It quietly got its name added to the list of Khronos Group sponsors at the beginning of September, without either Nintendo nor the standards club making a formal announcement.

NeoGaf was the first site to notice Nintendo turn up on the Khronos list.

As a contributor member, the venerable game outfit will have input into API development, but without the influence accorded to board members.

It will be working alongside makers of all the major browsers, along with ARM, Intel, IBM, Fujitsu, Sony and Microsoft, which joined during 2014.

Khronos is a cross-industry group spanning chip and device makers, PC firms and manufacturers of software and consumer electronics.

The group was originally set up in 2000 to handle the (ancient) SGI-developed OpenGL API, with WebGL following in 2011.

Nintendo's participation can probably be interpreted as another vote of confidence in the upcoming Vulkan API, OpenGL's replacement.

As we noted in March, OpenGL is getting overworked in modern platforms.

The complete rewrite in Vulkan is designed to present the world with a single API that's suitable for mobile, console and desktop machines.

At the end of August, Intel ran up its first Vulkan demo, with a video showing it outperforming OpenGL by around two-to-one. ®

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