Microsoft has just comfirmed that AMD Mantle is not compatible with the Xbox One. (Update : PS4 is not supported too.
Mantle API is actually a very exciting news for gamer,it allows game devs to directly communicate with the GPU,by that it'll probably improve performance by a bunch.
So,does that mean that some gamers dream have just basically gone?Since most of the AAA titles are ported from console,which isn't as optimized as some PC exclusive title (for example,Crysis 1)
Does that mean the new Mantle API that AMD introduce had failed?Let me know what you think about this.
No, nobody (except, kind of, Anandtech) ever said it would run on consoles. The fact that consoles don't support it isn't news.
It was always billed as a low level, console-style PC API. It still allows a lot of code and the basic low level architecture of console games to carry over, it just probably won't be a write-once, compile-anywhere kind of thing, which would be ridiculous to assume even if Mantle itself did run on the consoles.
The point with Mantle is to make it easier for developers to port said AAA games to the PC platform, it was not meant as a new competing API for consoles.
Consoles are not in need of this kind of API development, because console hardware is uniform. This is a problem PCs have. Our hardware has to be coded for, and this intermediary stage between application and hardware happens to be a bottleneck.
It does require more devs to actually use it in their games, which is subject to dev/hardware partnerships.
The point with Mantle is to make it easier for developers to port said AAA games to the PC platform, it was not meant as a new competing API for consoles.
PS4 devs already have hardware level access so the y don't need mantel. As for the Xbox One....well it makes sense that it's not compatible since Microsoft already have Direct X.
Let's just wait and see what happens. Hardware level access is a very exciting thing on PC. I hope the Mantel API thrives.
It has trade-offs. Since Nvidia will develop their own proprietary APIs (they already have NVAPI), and games will have vastly different performance levels of different hardware, which will be stupid.
Not saying low level API is a bad idea. Just that Nvidia and AMD relative performances could be vastly different.
Imo, Mantle will never be a mainstream technology, because the traditional PC platform has declined too much already, but it's nice to have a cross-platform API for graphics on GCN that's open sourced if AMD decides to do that, it will serve the open source community, especially the linux community, very well.
The point of mantle was to surpass DirectX latency. Nothing more. All the rest was and is speculation. Now we see a part of the speculation fall, and people start to panic?
The real goal of mantle was to get rid of Microsoft's DirectX. Microsoft is (or has become) lazy and inefficient as we all know, thats why DICE wants to break away from that model. At first they just contributed to directx 11.1 (which MS agreed to), but It seems they want to make their own api afterall. Thats what mantle is all about.
Directx9 had to go through ~11 object layers to get to the GPU. DirectX10/11 only had to go through ~9 or so. Dice feels it can do better, and be more innovative than lazy Microsoft Developers. Which I believe is pretty possible, considering DICE made cpu optimilisations in directx 11.1 themselves.