According to http://www.techspot.com/news/54134-amd-launches-mantle-api-t... : "We've been told at the GPU14 Tech Day event that the Mantle API is open, so theoretically Nvidia could purpose the technology in their GPUs." How feasible that is in reality is of course up for question. And I doubt that nVidia would be willing to implement an AMD-controlled API.
AMD Introduces "Mantle" API Initiative
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Re: AMD Introduces "Mantle" API Initiative
#12This is not for performance. OpenGL has very low overhead, and already allows you to "directly tap into the hardware" and "fully exploit the capabilities of modern GPUs". AMD wants people to write code that will not run on Nvidia and Intel hardware. Nvidia has been doing the same thing for years with CUDA.
Re: AMD Introduces "Mantle" API Initiative
#13Re: AMD Introduces "Mantle" API Initiative
#14This is not for performance. OpenGL has very low overhead, and already allows you to "directly tap into the hardware" and "fully exploit the capabilities of modern GPUs". AMD wants people to write code that will not run on Nvidia and Intel hardware. Nvidia has been doing the same thing for years with CUDA.
Standards are great, and I'd love OpenGL drivers to be as fast as possible, but OpenGL being what it is, this API seems pretty interesting to me.
Re: AMD Introduces "Mantle" API Initiative
#15This is not for performance. OpenGL has very low overhead, and already allows you to "directly tap into the hardware" and "fully exploit the capabilities of modern GPUs". AMD wants people to write code that will not run on Nvidia and Intel hardware. Nvidia has been doing the same thing for years with CUDA.
They quoted 9x drawcall rate improvement. This is especially important on AMD APUs which are relatively weak on the CPU side.
Re: AMD Introduces "Mantle" API Initiative
#16- Collaboration between AMD and DICE/EA
- The Frostbite engine, used in Battlefield 4, "will use "Mantle" low-level API instead of DX11 on compatible Radeon GPUs."
- "Mantle enables 9x more draw calls per second than any other APIs by reducing CPU overhead - works with all GCN GPUs!"
Re: AMD Introduces "Mantle" API Initiative
#17This is not for performance. OpenGL has very low overhead, and already allows you to "directly tap into the hardware" and "fully exploit the capabilities of modern GPUs". AMD wants people to write code that will not run on Nvidia and Intel hardware. Nvidia has been doing the same thing for years with CUDA.
Re: AMD Introduces "Mantle" API Initiative
#18This is not for performance. OpenGL has very low overhead, and already allows you to "directly tap into the hardware" and "fully exploit the capabilities of modern GPUs". AMD wants people to write code that will not run on Nvidia and Intel hardware. Nvidia has been doing the same thing for years with CUDA.
Re: AMD Introduces "Mantle" API Initiative
#19Re: AMD Introduces "Mantle" API Initiative
#20This is not for performance. OpenGL has very low overhead, and already allows you to "directly tap into the hardware" and "fully exploit the capabilities of modern GPUs". AMD wants people to write code that will not run on Nvidia and Intel hardware. Nvidia has been doing the same thing for years with CUDA.
There's a significant amount of overhead in the existing OpenGL API, which currently can only be mitigated somewhat through vendor-specific extensions. But extensions alone aren't sufficient to address some of the serious issues that the OpenGL API has today.
OpenGL forces you to maintain a tremendous amount of state information that significantly increases overhead.
John Carmack and many others have explicitly mentioned this in past discussions.
While I'm horrified at the idea of revisiting the days of 3DFX glide and installing my own client ICD into a game driectory, if Mantle drives the OpenGL ARB to start seriously addressing those issues and increases competition, then I'm all for it.