AMD unveils revolutionary 'Mantle' API to optimize GPU performance

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....

SteamOS developed in collaboration with Nvidia

Nvidia might not be interested in next-gen consoles, but it’s intimately involved with Valve’s new plans for SteamOS and associated hardware.

In a blog post, Nvidia’s Mark Smith said the PC hardware company has been working with Valve behind the scenes on SteamOS.

“Engineers from Valve and Nvidia have spent a lot of time collaborating on a common goal for SteamOS: to deliver an open-platform gaming experience with superior performance and uncompromising visuals directly on the big screen,” he wrote.

“NVIDIA engineers embedded at Valve collaborated on improving driver performance for OpenGL; optimizing performance on NVIDIA GPUs; and helping to port Valve’s award-winning content library to SteamOS; and tuning SteamOS to lower latency, or lag, between the controller and onscreen action. The collaboration makes sense as both companies strongly believe in the importance of open-platform innovation, and both companies are committed to providing gamers with a cutting-edge visual experience.”

It’s not clear if the collaboration extends to working the hardware prototypes that Valve will be sending to beta testers soon – but recent rumours suggest Valve’s Friday reveal will detail the hardware, and makes mention of Nvidia tech.

http://www.vg247.com/2013/09/26/steamos-developed-in-collaboration-with-nvidia/

picture taken from GAF of Carmack's twitter thoughts

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=686527

Mantle almost reminds me of 3DFX Glide to be honest. :P MY BODY IS READY AMD!

It will be interesting to see how MS react to all these announcements. They have had a troubled relationship with PC gaming since they announced the Xbox, that is for sure. Many of their attempts to push it into the direction they want, with Xbox live, using DirectX updates and game exclusives to push new OSes etc have mostly been poorly received to say the least. And their half hearted attempts to capitalize on the market such as their recent ill fated F2P push have fallen flat.

But I think they have always taken that they had PC gaming on lock with Windows, with DirectX on windows being the defacto choice for developers on PC. But Valve's push for Linux (OpenGL) and the SteamOS, AMD's new (platform agnostic) low level graphics API could threaten their iron grip on the market. Now in the overall PC market gaming is just a relatively small niche but it is also one of the few market segments that is growing. And with PC's and in turn Windows being leeched by the new and booming mobile market that MS are struggling to gain a foothold in. I am not sure that MS can afford to let any market slip through their fingers in the current market.

Moves like locking the latest small DirectX revision behind a Windows 8.1 seem a tad short sited in the big picture. With the cross platform Mantle and OpenGL both being pushed by major players in the industry locking small improvements may not be the best way of keeping developer support for their platform going forward. Valve and AMD are both promising enhanced performance over DirectX and easy porting from DirectX. It may be time for a major overhaul of the whole system to keep DirectX relevant.

Not that the PC gaming market is going to abandon Windows overnight, the number of people still using XP shows how resistant most are to new platforms. But it sure should be something that MS should be considering in their plans for the future of the platform.

Yea, I hope it works out better for AMD than it did for 3DFX lol. I wonder how many of the old 3DFX people are still at Nvidia these days, I imagine most were let go or left soon after they were bought (or jumped ship before).

From what I heard it was the 3dfx team that assisted in the design of the Geforce FX cards, if I was nVidia... ALL FIRED!

lol at least Nvidia got the SLI technology out of it

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Why fire talented people from 3Dfx ? if anything it was a smart move by nvidia to buy them.

Well, 3dfx SLI and nVidia's SLI works very differently.
3dfx SLI worked by grabbing all the odd and even scan-lines and one GPU will do the processing on all the even scan lines, the other card did the odd scan lines.
Aka. 3dfx SLI was "Scan Line Interleave" where-as nVidia's is "Scalable Link Interface".
nVidia and AMD on the otherhand might have one frame on one GPU, another frame on the next or Split the scene up into two halves with each GPU doing their half of a scene. etc'.

Basically all nVidia got out of 3dfx SLI was the technology short-name. :P

Well, they didn't exactly have the best track record besides the Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2.
Voodoo Rush, Banshee, Voodoo 4 and 5 all bombed or had bad-points.
The Voodoo 3 was only 16-bit (24bit) in a world that was moving to 32bit.
The Voodoo 5 6000 with it's 4x VSA100 chips could have been a beast, but benchmarks with that card against the Geforce 3 wasn't exactly favorable for 3dfx, but that was early stages, still it would have had a feature set that would have been behind nVidia and ATI.

Then you have the Geforce FX, nVidia's worse graphics card line-up besides the NV1 which wasn't even compatible with rendering what became the standard polygon.

So, really, the talented people at 3DFX (I'm not denying that they aren't talented!) had more products that did poorly than what did really well, nVidia was just aggressive with it's stupidly short development cycles which helped lead 3dfx to it's demise way too early IMHO and could have compounded why the Geforce FX was so horrible in many aspects.

Heck, I still have my Voodoo 2's, best retro GPU's of all time!

Also, my last comment was a more tongue in cheek comment. :P