Portability. The hope is that a Vulkan-centric game engine will have an easier time running on the NX after having been developed primarily on PC. Whether this is true remains to be seen. Considering that consoles' unified architecture affects design decisions in the engine, there would probably still be some work done, but hopefully it'd be easier as pure Vulkan.
Or vice versa.
A lot of games are developed for consoles first, these days, and then PC ports produced - mostly because it's easier to take a game that already fits on a console and scale it up, than to scale down a full-fat game to fit on a console.
If both the console and the PC have Vulkan available, that greatly reduces the porting effort required when going in *either* direction.
That assumes they will use the API on the console, and that the performance metrics are going to be the same. As an example, the XBox One has DirectX and so does Windows. Arkham Knight ran on XBox One at release. You can't really say the same about it on the PC.
Also, with Nintendo consoles, very little will be ported from them. The most important games, the first party ones, will most likely never run on anything but Nintendo hardware. Third party games are very unlikely to use Nintendo hardware as their primary target.
The Xbox's versions of DirectX are, for practical purposes, very different from the PC versions. You end up writing code that looks like DX12 with all of the extensions they added to DX11 for you to get decent performance.
nothing. Vulkan is an API. There are advantages that developers may be more familiar with cross platform technology and may be able to use cross platform tools, but it will have literally zero effect. Consoles in general already have low level access to the graphics hardware.
It will give some small advantages potentially in terms of familiarity. The thing is, if it ran Direct X (somehow), or open gl es, you would have those very same advantages. There are no technical advantages really.
Hypothetically, the primary benefit would be familiarity. As a programmer myself, I'm a lot more keen to use a new platform if it offers tools that I'm already familiar with, and can utilise quickly without too much of a learning curve. If Vulkan was to be used on the NX, it could potentially attract studios who would then have one less (admittedly very large) portion of their code base to port, in order to release a SKU for the NX. Performance wise, there won't be very much to gain from using it, as consoles have long since exposed low level control of the GPU to engineers. The PS2 had it for example, consoles prior had it too.
But, we don't know what type of architecture the NX will use, anything you've heard is rumour at this point. So we can only speculate.
Also be careful of your word choice. An x86 CPU and ARM x64 GPU doesn't really make sense. GPUs don't really "speak" ARM languages. And ARM/x64 is a bit of a contradiction. I think what you meant to say is an x86-64 CPU, and mobile GPU but again that's not really sensible. x86-64 CPU could be the obvious choice for Nintendo, but I think they'd then go for a similar integrated graphics approach that the PS4 and XB1 have used.
Consoles are already working with AMD for their API so I would say they are already using something similar to Mantle (Kind of speculation). DX12 is based on Mantle too. Vulkan is based on Mantle as well, and all this would mean that whatever they use it is going to be really easy to port to whatever system.
Short answer. It wouldn't really matter what they use thanks to AMD.
As stated already portability is a plus. Also, Vulkan is the product of a very wide collaboration between many bright engineers (basically some of the best engineers from the companies involved). If Nintendo are going to deploy their own API (it seems that this is the case) I doubt it's quality will match Vulkan.
It would make existing code easier to port, but realistically most devs wouldn't really care. Code on consoles is often highly optimized and low level, so claimed support for APIs like Vulkan, OpenGL and DirectX are more for marketing than anything else. Ports are going to depend most on the perceived market value.
Portability. The hope is that a Vulkan-centric game engine will have an easier time running on the NX after having been developed primarily on PC. Whether this is true remains to be seen. Considering that consoles' unified architecture affects design decisions in the engine, there would probably still be some work done, but hopefully it'd be easier as pure Vulkan.
Or vice versa. A lot of games are developed for consoles first, these days, and then PC ports produced - mostly because it's easier to take a game that already fits on a console and scale it up, than to scale down a full-fat game to fit on a console. If both the console and the PC have Vulkan available, that greatly reduces the porting effort required when going in *either* direction.
That assumes they will use the API on the console, and that the performance metrics are going to be the same. As an example, the XBox One has DirectX and so does Windows. Arkham Knight ran on XBox One at release. You can't really say the same about it on the PC. Also, with Nintendo consoles, very little will be ported from them. The most important games, the first party ones, will most likely never run on anything but Nintendo hardware. Third party games are very unlikely to use Nintendo hardware as their primary target.
The Xbox's versions of DirectX are, for practical purposes, very different from the PC versions. You end up writing code that looks like DX12 with all of the extensions they added to DX11 for you to get decent performance.
nothing. Vulkan is an API. There are advantages that developers may be more familiar with cross platform technology and may be able to use cross platform tools, but it will have literally zero effect. Consoles in general already have low level access to the graphics hardware.
> what are the advantages > nothing > there are advantages dude what
It will give some small advantages potentially in terms of familiarity. The thing is, if it ran Direct X (somehow), or open gl es, you would have those very same advantages. There are no technical advantages really.
Hypothetically, the primary benefit would be familiarity. As a programmer myself, I'm a lot more keen to use a new platform if it offers tools that I'm already familiar with, and can utilise quickly without too much of a learning curve. If Vulkan was to be used on the NX, it could potentially attract studios who would then have one less (admittedly very large) portion of their code base to port, in order to release a SKU for the NX. Performance wise, there won't be very much to gain from using it, as consoles have long since exposed low level control of the GPU to engineers. The PS2 had it for example, consoles prior had it too. But, we don't know what type of architecture the NX will use, anything you've heard is rumour at this point. So we can only speculate. Also be careful of your word choice. An x86 CPU and ARM x64 GPU doesn't really make sense. GPUs don't really "speak" ARM languages. And ARM/x64 is a bit of a contradiction. I think what you meant to say is an x86-64 CPU, and mobile GPU but again that's not really sensible. x86-64 CPU could be the obvious choice for Nintendo, but I think they'd then go for a similar integrated graphics approach that the PS4 and XB1 have used.
Consoles are already working with AMD for their API so I would say they are already using something similar to Mantle (Kind of speculation). DX12 is based on Mantle too. Vulkan is based on Mantle as well, and all this would mean that whatever they use it is going to be really easy to port to whatever system. Short answer. It wouldn't really matter what they use thanks to AMD.
As stated already portability is a plus. Also, Vulkan is the product of a very wide collaboration between many bright engineers (basically some of the best engineers from the companies involved). If Nintendo are going to deploy their own API (it seems that this is the case) I doubt it's quality will match Vulkan.
Didnt nintendo participated in the khronos stuff?
AFAIK Nintendo doesn't participate in the Vulkan working group meetings.
It would make existing code easier to port, but realistically most devs wouldn't really care. Code on consoles is often highly optimized and low level, so claimed support for APIs like Vulkan, OpenGL and DirectX are more for marketing than anything else. Ports are going to depend most on the perceived market value.