Microsoft could also fix direct x and people will flock back to it.
Don't think so. OpenGL runs everywhere, that's THE advantage and Mantle should also run everywhere (if others join AMD) and be more low-level which means that it'll be faster than D3D anyway. There is no reason for D3D at all if Mantle takes off.
Will be cool (assumming it isnt proprietry, because that would stop it taking off) that and something like physics support on the IGP now(too kill nvidias physx) :p
^^ Its open source
Cool now we just need support for running physics on the IGPs (and/or the GPU) and we can move forward. Think actual bullet-holes with light-shafts, realistically destructible building (including castles made of individual bricks), realistic car crashes in racing games, realistic footprints/dirt simulation etc..etc..
www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFqNh-hxme8
No, it's not. We don't have information about the license of the code. What we know is that AMD wants the API (yes, that's different from the implementation) to be open. For example, OpenGL is open but there are only very few open source implementations, like mesa.
You could do this for ages with OpenCL and with physics engines which support OpenCL like bullet.
I haven't heard of any such physics engine like which can just plug into opencl and work (for game developers)... It really needs to be off-the-shelve, non-vendor locked and 100% ready to go for game developers to implement it (like physx, but not vendor locked). I know you can make stuff like that on OpenCL but most game developers don't make their own engines, it is a really big ask to have them design a physics engine to work with openCL...
It's called bullet.
You all, go read the article and think on it really really carefully.
So here's my opinion:
Despite all the valid caveats, I'm positively giddy right now.
By Occam's razor and just general bloody common sense the console connection is absolutely inevitable.
Ever since they announced the new console specs, I've been preaching left and right how awesome they are. Not because I'm a fanboy mind you(if anything you could put me in the hater camp, never owned one, probably never will), but because of the impact they will have on PC gaming and the industry in general. Case in point right here.
Maybe even, just maybe with that very same connection the industry will sit down on their collective asses and standardize some of the stuff. One can always dream...
Still, back to the real world. Wait and see we must. I hope it turns out the silver bullet we all want it to be.
Even not taking mantle into account I already thought things would start to sway more in amd's favour with the new consoles...
The targeting of weaker/many cores vs 'the mighty single thread" and basic gcn architecture in place from the get go would definitely give amd the edge in benchmarks straight out of the gates on new game releases.. (on the cpu front it would narrow the playing field against the best that intel can offer, on the gpu front it would put them ahead)
And that is not even taking mantle into account. Mantle is just the icing on the cake.
I can see nvidia spending a lot of time with many more frequent driver releases playing catch up just to get that little more performance out of games to compete.
Hopefully people will wake up and realize that the importance of single thread performance in gaming was largely artificial in the first place.
From the slides that dice produced and the explanation from their engineer it should be readily apparent that the only reason we needed strong single thread performance in gaming in the first place was because of the inefficiencies of directx.
as a side note..
I am interested to see what the igp of apu's are capable of with mantle, it would be awesome if we could get ps4 level performance out of a 6800k fm2 rig on it's igp alone :D