AMD’s Ritche Corpus has come up on their official blog to discuss Mantle. He discusses the four core principles behind Mantle, informing its creation and what it will do for games in general.
I’ll go out of order for this one and tackle the 4th principle first, since it’s most relevant to current discussions regarding the API/standard. AMD promises Mantle will not break games. They claim that Mantle has been designed with other architectures in mind, and so the optimizations developers will have to do to use Mantle will not get in the way of them optimizing the game for other standards.
This is definitely addressing the kinds of concerns developers like Ubisoft had when they stated in an interview that Mantle is a double-edged sword. Ubisoft is excited for Mantle’s potential, but also worried that they would have to deal with the additional development time needed. For Ubisoft, this is time taken away from improving a game’s visuals and performance.
AMD’s other principles run across similar lines. They made Mantle to help developers, and certainly, a low level API will unequivocally help make development easier, since it makes console and PC development much more similar to each other. Mantle will also help PC gamers get better performance, in a way that can be more efficiently drawn out by developers.
Lastly, with Mantle AMD hopes to push forward graphics API innovation. Again, AMD is careful to choose their words here, making it clear that AMD is not meant to replace Direct X (and presumably, OpenCL and OpenGL). Rather, Mantle complements other low level APIs for the benefit of developers.
Mantle itself is more than just an API. As AMD defines it, it’s a combination of the low-level driver, a Graphics Core Next enabled chip, and a game engine that uses the Mantle SDK.
AMD promises to reveal what we want to know about Mantle in the AMD Developer Summit next month, including showing off some demos. I personally feel we should not be too hasty to judge how much impact it will have towards console or PC gaming, and really, just keep track of how things play out as the new consoles release and the first batch of games that contend with all these new standards get released.
Source: AMD Blogs
