AMD have been busy with promotion of their Mantle API, which isn’t surprising given the time and money they’ve invested in it. Developers such as DICE have already jumped on the technology, and as AMD have pointed out currently they’re the only choice when it comes to a low level API. But that’s going to change in the future, with both OpenGL and Microsoft’s DirectX’s updates coming out. Despite little information about say, DX12 it’s safe to say that it’ll provide a safe and familiar environment to devs.
But AMD are posting a few blogs and a White Paper. Let’s discuss the blog posts first, shall we? They’re not the most technical of documents, and have a distinct air of PR / marketing speak, but do serve to provide a brief overview of the benefits and uses of AMD’s Mantle technology.
The Mantle White Paper however is a more complicated and in-depth analysis. AMD takes their time in elaborating on a myriad of technical aspects of their API. Although of course anyone is welcome to take a peak, unless you’ve a decent understanding of programming and the technical aspects of computers you’ll likely struggle to understand much of it. We’ll try and doing an analysis of the white paper in the not to distant future, as within the pages it contains Mantle’s memory model, execution model, pipeline model, and the basic rules of why low level API’s provide a performance improvement over the high level API (say Microsoft’s DX11).
