Scale content up or down
OpenGL ES 2.0 shaders on mobile devices are an exciting prospect, but most content also has to scale down to lower-performance OpenGL ES 1.x devices. That's why Marmalade provides a scalable content pipeline: a way for artists and programmers to create materials with shaders and multiple texture stages for OpenGL ES 2.0 devices.
How the scalable content pipeline works
If the same assets are run on devices with only OpenGL ES 1.x support, the shaders fall away and only the first two texture stages are used. (That said, fixed-function effects such as normal mapping are, of course, still available for OpenGL ES 1.x.) If they are run on devices without hardware graphics acceleration, only the first texture stage – the diffuse map – is used.
Support all graphics platforms
Marmalade also provides programmers with an abstracted stream-based drawing API. So, only a single set of application rendering codes is required to support all graphics platforms – OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenGL ES 1.x and software rendering.