At AMD's GPU14 Tech Day event in Hawaii, alongside the brand new Radeon R9 290X GPU, the company has also unveiled a new development model called 'Mantle'. As a combination of both API specifications and GPU drivers, Mantle will allow developers to fully unlock the graphics potential of the GCN architecture of the new (and likely the previous) Radeon series, through low-level high-performance drivers.

Battlefield 4 will be the first title to use Mantle, with the technology coming through a free update in December. Mantle brings greater control of the GPU and CPU to game developers, especially in the memory department, which will allow games to harness the full potential of graphics cards. This model will be more similar to what is found on consoles, where developers have huge control over what hardware they use in their games.

While the technology is still in early stages, EA says it will allow PC game developers to harness even more graphics power than ever before. Where possible, Mantle will be used instead of DirectX 11 on compatible AMD hardware, although it's still compatible with other rendering APIs. AMD claims Mantle enables nine times more draw calls per second than other APIs, which is a huge increase in performance.

We've been told at the GPU14 Tech Day event that the Mantle API is open, so theoretically Nvidia could purpose the technology in their GPUs. It should also make cross-development between PC and console games a lot easier, and also more incredible for those with a high-performance AMD GPU.

More information on Mantle will be available at the AMD Developer Summit in November.

http://www.techspot.com/news/54134-amd-launches-mantle-api-to-optimize-pc-gpu-performance.html

That explains the DX/OpenGL bashing last year lol. I am not really sure if going back to prepritary graphics API is a good thing overall tho....

Still this could go a long way towards closing the gap in performance between consoles and similar hardware on PC. And likely exposes the same feature set (with more added in the future) that the prepriatary APIs on consoles will.

Pleasy Nvidia swallow that pride and add support for this with Maxwell and don't roll your own FFS...

Well damn, nvidia could face irrelevancy if they don't start supporting this LOL. If every game engine starts shoving this API like crazy this could mean that almost every game will start biasing towards AMD hardware. It also means that benchmarks will show that nvidia will be at a crazy disadvantage at the same time too. Good news I think is this is an open API.

I wouldb't go that far, AMD have said it's open so in theory if Nvidia wanted too they could support the API in the future. Nvidia also have other ways of staying relevant, you could safely assume that if they didn't support it that all the TWIMTBP titles that Nvidia work with won't support the API. And from the sound of things they are working closly with Valve on the SteamOS. Nvidia have long pushed a lot of prepriatary tech like CODA and PhysX as well.

They'd have to create some new arhitecture that shares alot of similarities with GCN. I don't think nvidia has an API yet to fight against the mantle since they haven't created one yet. The one about the steambox is that it's pretty much bound to fail if valve doesn't give any exclusive games. Just because nvidia has proprietary technology doesn't mean that it will gain huge traction because this time mantle is more dangerous to nvidia than physx or cuda is to amd. 

Rising from the dead and headed to the top aren't we AMD?

I guess AMD's idea of domination was to control the console market so that they would also bring the whole PC market to it's knees. XD

But from the sound of things if Mantle gets big Nvidia have the option of supporting it themselves. I imagine that Nvidia will be aiming for a superset of GCN's featureset with Maxwell anyway as most of it is required for DX11.2 support anyway (MS seems to have moved to get DX11.2 mostly in line with XBone with tiled resources etc). It's not like AMD is going to design the API just for GCN's architecture (tho it will surely favor it) it's not like AMD are going to be using GCN forever after all they will eventually change their own architecture.

The API may be aiming to be lower level than OpenGL/Direct3D but their is still the graphics driver between the API and the hardware

Nvidia may have to do a bit of extra work on the driver side instruction translation which may negatively effect performance but they probably wouldn't be left completly in the dark. AMD will have a leg up for sure but I don't think this is an Nvidia killing move. Nvidia still have more marketshare (while demanding a premium price) so developers can't really afford to cut them out too much.

Is this a move that could give AMD a nice competitive advantage for sure, but it's not an Nvidia killing move I don't think. Not on it's own anyway.

Nvidia must seriously be regreting the decision to not support either the PS4 or xbone right now because this is going to comeback and haunt them in the benchmarks badly if they don't instantly support this thing with maxwell.

I don't understand but this sounds fascinating.

It may not be an nvidia killing move but I think It could be much worse such as amd trying to get a monopoly on the whole dGPU market.