AMD Announces The Radeon R9 290X

[Asariati]

This Mantle endavour raises few more questions in terms of Linux support. First I assue that'd mean completly new driver, in what form/which licence. Would it be proprietary in similar fashion to fglrx or FOSS libs + kernel bits. Now if foss, then how it is related to existing infrasrtucture (ttm&co). Knowing it's much low-level API I guess it'd need completly new memory manager and probably at least fewother changes in kernel. How those things affect chances of being rejected from mainline kernel inclusion.

There is no "new driver" needed. Mantle is just an API like OpenGL on top of some hardware abstraction layer (or whatever you want to call it).

So far, there is not a lot of information - well, *no* information so we need to wait and see...

Edit: Here is some more info from German PCGH Magazine:

Raja Koduri said that AMD doesn't understand Mantle as an Open Standard like OpenGL or OpenCL. Instead, it hopes Mantle will be established as a quasi-standard by/in the industry. They hope that besides DICE and some so-far-unnamed developers others will adapt Mantle, too.
If some other hardware developers asks AMD if they can provide a Mantle driver and backend, AMD won't say no immediately.

This sounds a lot like the PhysX driver bullshit Nvidia is doing when using an AMD-card as primary card...

[johnc]

If you read the article I linked earlier, Mantle is essentially integrated inside the existing Catalyst driver. By stating that it is 'sharing a common codebase between all OSs' implies any OS/console with the AMD Catalyst drivers will support Mantle.

Your links say nothing of the sort. The fact is, we have no idea.

[Ramiliez]

Your links say nothing of the sort. The fact is, we have no idea.

Larabel said it and so far Mantle is Windows 8 only with strong indication of xbone support

[johnc]

Larabel said it and so far Mantle is Windows 8 only with strong indication of xbone support

Where did you see that it only works on the Windows 8 version of Windows? If that's true I'd be even more convinced this a MS string pull.

[Ramiliez]

Where did you see that it only works on the Windows 8 version of Windows? If that's true I'd be even more convinced this a MS string pull.

Sorry my memory failed me but so far its only confirmed OS no mentions of other Windows OS were there.

http://hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTM4MDE1MzA4MEE1Z0Z4RmY5RHpfMV8xX2wuanBn

[johnc]

Sorry my memory failed me but so far its only confirmed OS no mentions of other Windows OS were there.
http://hardocp.com/image.html?image=...pfMV8xX2wuanBn

Ahh ok... That looks like the DirectX version of BF4 they were talking about there.

I guess we'll learn more at the AMD Dev conference in Nov. Or... maybe we won't.

[bridgman]

I guess we'll learn more at the AMD Dev conference in Nov. Or... maybe we won't.

I'm going with "you will".

[johnc]

I'm going with "you will".

Thanks for looking into that for us.

[smitty3268]

So far it seems probably that Raja mentioned "an upcoming announcement" and someone in the media interpreted "upcoming" as "tomorrow". Knowing Raja if he had meant "tomorrow" he would have said "tomorrow", not "upcoming".

So, I'm wondering if this linux announcement might be an EGL driver? (e.g. Wayland/Mir support) I wasn't expecting anything quite so fast from AMD, but with Fedora and Ubuntu both starting to actually move beyond X maybe they've decided to try and be more proactive than usual.

[bridgman]

So, I'm wondering if this linux announcement might be an EGL driver? (e.g. Wayland/Mir support) I wasn't expecting anything quite so fast from AMD, but with Fedora and Ubuntu both starting to actually move beyond X maybe they've decided to try and be more proactive than usual.

There's no real change in strategy here, we've been gradually ramping up Linux efforts for years now. What folks are seeing now is that gradual increase in resources => gradual increase in frequency of nice things coming out.