AMD Will Release Mantle Programming Guide, API Reference This Month

[gens]

3dnow was used by very few games like Quake to get a similar speed compared to Pentium 2. It was before the rise of the Athlon, but AMD basically never gained the speed trophy after Core 2 Quad was out. Mantle was the one and only way to let their hardware shine on their own slow CPUs. If they wanted to shine in more than a handful games they would have talked to Nvidia/Intel before. It was a marketing gag, not more.

that it was not used does not mean it was useless

only now with... i think avx2 do we have horizontal add (accumulate, also madd)
XOP is an example of something amazing that is not used all that often

[Maxjen]

They even suggest Vulkan/DirectX12 themselves.

The Mantle SDK also remains available to partners who register in this co-development and evaluation program. However, if you are a developer interested in Mantle "1.0" functionality, we suggest that you focus your attention on DirectX? 12 or GLnext.

Mayble they see Mantle as an unstable branch of Vulkan/DirectX where they can test and refine new API ideas.

[whitecat]

But: Mantle was never designed to make Nvidia gfx faster or Intel. It was a filler between the real solution, nothing more.

Like Google and the SPDY - HTTP/2.0 story then.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

RIP Mantle, useless single vendor effort. 3dnow was a failure, but at least x86-64 was widely adopted.

Really? I don't see all 3 consoles being a failure. More to the point, Mantle will most certainly be adopted by vendors developing across PS4/XBox and Nintendo WII replacement.

Next Gen OpenGL won't be mature for another 24-36 months. Directx 12 will take another 12-18 months. Meanwhile, vendors are wise to use Mantle.

Any one who thinks R9 300 series GPGPUs won't fly off the shelves knowing vendors will be leveraging the crap out of them are very short-sighted in their reasoning.

PC Gaming and Mantle will only grow, right along-side Consoles. Nvidia's dominance will dwindle as more games get far more performance out of AMD GPGPUs and switch their backends to leverage it. This means more used Nvidia cards on EBay.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

They even suggest Vulkan/DirectX12 themselves.



Mayble they see Mantle as an unstable branch of Vulkan/DirectX where they can test and refine new API ideas.

The exact opposite. Mantle is here and now, and has been for over 12 months evolving. Vulkan/DirectX 12 are in their infancy and will not be touched for years, while OpenGL 4.5 adoption evolves. Gaming will use Mantle. Microsoft will dump a ton of resources into Directx 12 but with AMD able to control the console hardware they don't have to jump when MS says jump.

[smitty3268]

RIP Mantle, useless single vendor effort.

Maybe, but you could make a strong argument it was the #1 responsible factor in getting us DX12 and Vulkan, so I'd hardly call it useless. It did exactly what AMD wanted, which was to move the entire industry towards using GPU's the way they wanted.

[dungeon]

Mayble they see Mantle as an unstable branch of Vulkan/DirectX where they can test and refine new API ideas.

Mantle is all separate from those two, it is special "right to the metal and custom" API, thus is not generic design like DirectX or OpenGL.

Just think of it, something being generic (it needs to work on intel, amd, nvidia, etc... hardware) it will never go so well for all of them and will never be optimized for particular piece of hardware and you will always have corner cases which are slow, sometimes for all vendors or sometimes on some of them.

[Kano]

As you get Win 10 for free there is no reason that it should be take long to adopt DX12. you can already try WDDM 2.0 drivers. Check dxdiag with Win 10 preview. There is no reason to wait for DX12 hardware, just WDDM 2.0 is required. Most likely you can try Vulcan soon. Mantle was Windows only (unlikely that this will change), so I don't get why somebody from a Linux forum would hype it so much. Lets try Vulcan soon...

[Guest]

accumulate, min, max, sqrt
idk why people trash 3dnow so much, i think it was good

If anything, people should trash Intel for not adopting it and instead coming mmx and later sse instructions.
And then doing the same with sse4a and coming instead with their own sse4.x .
Intel got away with it due to it's market share, which arguably wasn't true back in late 90's when AMD had arguable
edge over intel in both performance and price although their fragile chips would often break during instalation (but I digress).

[blackout23]

The exact opposite. Mantle is here and now, and has been for over 12 months evolving. Vulkan/DirectX 12 are in their infancy and will not be touched for years, while OpenGL 4.5 adoption evolves. Gaming will use Mantle. Microsoft will dump a ton of resources into Directx 12 but with AMD able to control the console hardware they don't have to jump when MS says jump.

Nope. Mantle is pretty much irrelevant for future games.

Mantle?s definition of ?open? must widen. It already has, in fact. This vital effort has replaced our intention to release a public Mantle SDK, and you will learn the facts on Thursday, March 5 at GDC 2015 - See more at: http://community.amd.com/community/a....UokhMrHz.dpuf

They can't make it more obvious that offering Mantle to Khronos has lead them to ditch it. Or what else should that more open and vital effort be that coincidentally is revealed the same day Valve presents Vulkan?