AMD’s Mantle: where it stands after 6 months

Mantle was a bold move by AMD, I’ll give them that. In a world where everything froze after DirectX 11, along came this new paradigm in developing games closer to the metal, and suddenly everything was put in motion.

More and more games started supporting Mantle, Microsoft suddenly started talking about DirectX 12, NVIDIA optimized its drivers to match Mantle’s performance… win-win all around for consumers. Robert Hallock, who does Technical Communications for Desktop Graphics at AMD, updated his blog with some perspective on where Mantle support is today, and where it’s headed. It’s a very interesting read, and here is a small part:

In the six months since Mantle’s January launch, it has quickly grown to be incredibly successful: seven game developers have pledged support, four game engines have adopted and 20+ games will be Mantle-based. Within those figures, Crytek and AMD recently announced Mantle support in Cryengine, and AMD joined forces with 2K Games to bring Mantle support to Sid Meier’s Civilization®: Beyond Earth™. In addition, this month marked the start of the private beta program for the Mantle SDK, which boasts another 40 developers committed to exploring the benefits of our revolutionary API.

With all this momentum for Mantle, we thought it would be a good time to look forwards, backwards and sideways at Mantle to give a comprehensive view of how and why it has achieved overwhelming industry praise. Let’s start, however, by looking at how Mantle reclaims lost performance for gamers.

You can find the rest of his blog entry here.