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Modern PC gaming has been built on the back of Microsoft’s on-going DirectX initiative, so where will AMD’s focus be as we move into a post-Mantle-launch world.
“AMD is focused on DX right now”, said Byrne explained.
“Mantle is a disruptor”, he said. “It’s a differentiator and it allows developers to pick up huge improvements in performance using existing hardware”.
So is there a genuine/practical application?
“AMD is in the fortunate place right now of working closely with Mantle and DirectX – allowing us to recommend and support both APIs and encouraging developers to use the right tools for the right job”, Byrne told us.
“Generally Mantle shows the world that things can be different. It gets people thinking”, he said. “Starting with Battlefield 4 and Thief, which also includes AMD’s TrueAudio technology”.
“We are working hard to get to the new AMD”, said Byrne. “New hardware, new software, new bundles, multiple boards all working together in harmony. It’s going to be a very different experience”.
If you search for public statements that today's Intel graphics specialists were making around 3 years ago, you'll find something like “DirectX unfortunately tends to rob you of quite a lot of the performance, and most importantly it robs you of the opportunity to innovate”.
While there's no way that you would get anyone from AMD or Microsoft to comment on the situation, there's a strong feeling in the market that AMD created Mantle and then Microsoft brought it in-house as the basis of its thinking for DX12. Given AMD/ATi's long history of working closely with the Microsoft console team, it's easy to see how this might be true. Hardware and driver engineers, working around a deliberately limited platform, would look for every means possible to extract additional performance. Seems logical that Mantle would come from that knowledge base and that, once it had been shown to Microsoft, they would jump on the chance to improve the overall performance of their core OS. We'll mark that down as a definite possibility.
Leading takes different thinking and, again, you have to say that Mantle certainly is different.
