A recent Japanese article featured on ITMedia highlighted the possibility of Sony utilising the OpenGL API for the forthcoming PlayStation3. According to a report on EETimes, it’s claimed that Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) have become one of nine members of the Khronos Group consortium (focused on the creation of open standard, royalty-free APIs to enable the authoring and playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices) with the intention of using the standardised API throughout its future products.
To date Sony has used proprietary APIs that have changed with each generation; however a standard API would seem to make sense, considering that the CELL processor is likely to feature across a wide selection of products and future Playstation models.
The move would also likely please developers who’ve found developing on the highly specialised PlayStation 2 very difficult to say the least; whilst many have labelled it as a reactive decision to Microsoft’s plans to create XNA – a unified graphics development environment that allows developers to easily create games for the PC and Xbox products.
Naturally this is speculation at this stage, with no official announcement yet to come from Sony; however this is certainly an interesting development in the next-gen conflict.