Saturday, November 9, 2013

AMD Mantle

Having announced all their new value/bang for buck Volcanic Island cards - with one being reviewed by Phoronix here - AMD/ATI have now announced their new Graphics API Mantle.

It pretty much replaces OpenGL and DirectX, giving developers a closer, lower level access to the graphics card chips and such. This being similar to NVAPI and Glide from 3dfx. Firstly heard it from Star Citizen, which will be supporting it, characteristic of it supporting all cool advancement in PC technologies like the Oculus Rift. What this means is considerable improvement in GPU utilisation, and hopefully a Linux client via Mantle. There could also be a PS4 version if Sony lets CIG do their stuff on it, how they like. Here's some more info:


However, John Carmack (now at Oculus VR) says OpenGL can reach that (9x faster draw calls) performance, when utilising extensions from nVidia. Speaking of Oculus, a post about that should come somewhat later. =)

There should be a lot more info released during the AMD Conference on the 11th-13th this month.