GRVK Allows AMD's Deprecated Mantle API To Run Atop Vulkan

There are just a handful of games like Battlefield 4, Thief, and others that can make use of AMD's long-deprecated Mantle graphics API as the predecessor to modern graphics APIs like Vulkan and Direct3D 12. Mantle never was brought to Linux given the emphasis quickly turned to Vulkan within The Khronos Group, but now with the open-source "GRVK" project it's being mapped on top of Vulkan.

Independent open-source developer Clément Guérin took to implementing Mantle on top of the Vulkan API largely as a learning exercise. But it does have the potential of helping the few games/engines supporting Mantle to potentially run faster under Wine / Steam Play than the likes of the D3D11 code paths, but that's yet to be determined given the initial release of GRVK does little more than correctly render a triangle.

GRVK is to Mantle over Vulkan as DXVK is to Direct3D 9/10/11 over Vulkan. With this initial release of GRVK, a triangle is now rendering correctly with the original AMDIL shaders compiled to SPIR-V on-demand.

For those interested in this hobby project for AMD's Mantle implemented on top of Vulkan, see the project's GitHub. This is working on the latest Vulkan Linux drivers (just not AMD but other vendors as well) while running the software within Wine and GRVK also works natively on Windows.