There is an interesting interview on AMD's Mantle over at http://www.hardware.fr/focus/89/amd-mantle-interview-raja-koduri.html
jump the link for full interview but some interesting bits.
So the new consoles were the catalyst for Mantle to be launched on Windows ?
RK - I wouldn't say that because this is driven more by the game developers than us, so the game developers are ready for major kind of tests, working on new engines, new stuff and they really want to take the PC as a first class citizen. They don't want to forget it as they're architecting their engines for new consoles. They really want to make sure that PC performance moves forward. It's a better timing from a game engine stand point than AMD stand point.
If the game engines [developers] were ready to say "hey we'll put dedicated effort", if Johan came to us and say "I have time I will do the work now" and half dozen other people like Johan also put their hands up, I'm sure other companies and AMD would have say yes years ago to do that thing but they were busy with the last generation consoles, PC and other stuff. Now they're ready.
During the presentation of Mantle you said it was developed with several AAA developers in the gaming industry. In addition to DICE, when can we expect the first announcements ? Around the developer summit (APU13) ?
RK - I think you may see more around developer summit. Mantle for us is a very developer driven effort, when they are ready they'll say it. Johan was ready he said it. It is not like we came up with Mantle then we kind of want to push it, it is not AMD's CUDA.
Can you see a game developer providing Mantle as the only PC renderer, getting rid of DirectX renderer ?
RK - I can't see that happening. If you look at it practically, that doesn't make sense for any game developer. In fact no single API today makes sense for any game developer. Today if you look at a game engine, they have DirectX, they have OpenGL, more OpenGL ES to get to those other platforms, they have the low level consoles APIs whatever they are. So they at least have 4 paths these days at a minimum that a game engine supports if the game engine needs to be taken seriously. So I don't think it will be a single API world, because it is not a single API world today.
Still we could imagine that a developer could use Mantle-like API on game consoles and would not want to develop a DirectX renderer for the PC market only…
RK - There is a PC market with Mantle but there is a PC market without Mantle…so…
Do you expect your competitors to respond with a Mantle-like approach ?
RK - I can't really comment but my gentle view is I think we all eventually are trying to do what is the right thing for the gamers and the game developers. If Mantle is solving a problem that the game developers have and if our competitors are compelled to solve the same problem, they have to do something about it.
Let's say half the games are using Mantle and the other half are using Nvidia's Mantle ? It could fragment the PC market.
RK - It could but in our view that's the responsibility of the game developers to ensure that their users, that could be on Nvidia, or AMD or consoles or whatever, all are getting a good experience.
The other key thing about Mantle is that today a significant amount of the game titles are based on [middleware] engines, the top 4 or 5 engines are covering a huge percentage of the market. If these engines are taking care of the platform differences, hardware differences, Nvidia, AMD, Sony, Microsoft, the actual game developer is covered from that issue.
That's actually the difference between now and ten years ago. Ten years ago, fifteen years ago the engines didn't have as much market share as today. That's why a combination of the engines being where they are and this new console transition and GCN architecture just felt for us like the right time to do something like this. All the issues you bring up are real issues but now the responsibility of managing that is with the game engine, it's not with us, and frankly it's not with the game developers either. It is with the game engine, think of the game engine as this OS and hardware abstraction layer that is proving the service.
A game engine like Frostbite being able to deliver more performance, more draw calls, more things… their view is that it's a competitor edge for the game engine. The view that it's a competitor edge for AMD is a side effect. It's really about the competitor edge for the game engine that it can do more on this hardware.
There were reports yesterday about Mantle being an open standard ???
Chris Hook, Head of PR - Mantle is an industry standard.
So Mantle is not an open standard ? Let's say some IHVs [Independent Hardware Vendors] want to write a Mantle backend/driver, what would be the requirements for them ?
RK - Mantle is in a very early stage, it's the first disclosure about it we've done, we have the first proof point using that, that is going to ship into some products. We are open to many possibilities with Mantle. We are open to being open; we are open to being standard. How it evolves if our competitor approaches us and says "we want to be compatible with Mantle" ? ... That's a conversation we are not going to shut down.
Chris Hook, Head of PR - There aren't many companies of course... Because of GCN they don't have Mantle capable hardware today…
RK - But Johan said it clearly in his video that he's hoping that Mantle becomes a standard adopted by other companies which means, because game developers were involved in the design, there was feedback loop, … that it is not designed in such a way that it can only work on our architecture. It's a thin abstraction, it's low level. Still it kind of amazingly provides all the performance, all what can be allowed on our architecture.
Is Mantle already influencing future GPU designs ? Could it bring more freedom for you to add extra features ?
RK - What's happening, the next DirectX, advances in OpenGL, advances in OpenCL, it's the same initiative that we have. We take all of this into consideration. I wouldn't say that we are just looking at Mantle and say "oh I can go off and do something crazy", definitely not thinking along this direction. But it does bring an ability for us to expose if we come off with an hardware innovation and we couldn't get it into a standard API for whatever reason, because of the cycle or something… It does provide a path mechanism for us to make it available to the developers, which is always a nice thing for a hardware company to be able to do.
Could we imagine that in a couple of years, a future architecture won't be able to run the first Mantle games ? Or did you design Mantle to be forward compatible ? There's always this kind of tradeoff with a lower level access…
RK - Those are all great questions but… Frankly we'll see how it goes. At the end of the day forward compatibility and backward compatibility are important aspects but if they're getting in the way of solving a problem at a given point of time, if they're getting in the way of exposing something that the new hardware is capable of that makes the game be hundred times more realistic, we have to be practical about it and that’s how we move things forward. We move technology forward and at some point of time we have to say "out with the old compatibility", and move forward. If not you get stuck.
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