Since the advent of Mantle, gamers widely believed that Mantle would become an industry-standard graphics API or, at the very least, inspire successors that would offer similarly powerful benefits to hardware beyond AMD Radeon™ graphics. Many hoped that Mantle would come to OSes beyond Windows, too. These voices weren’t wrong: those were our goals, too!

The recent arrival of those oh-so-inspired successors has subsequently honed this chatter to one question: “What does Mantle do now?” AMD has cryptically replied—with very good reason—that Mantle’s destiny is openness and coexistence. Today we’re ready to be clear on one aspect of what that means.

The cross-vendor Khronos Group has chosen the best and brightest parts of Mantle to serve as the foundation for “Vulkan,” the exciting next version of the storied OpenGL API.

WHAT THIS MEANS

OpenGL has long and deservedly commanded respect for being a fast, versatile and wide open API that works on all graphics vendors across multiple operating systems.

Meanwhile, Mantle has seen acclaim for many improvements in gaming and game development: higher framerates, reduced rendering latency, reduced GPU power consumption, better use of multi-core CPUs, and re-pioneering new features like split-frame rendering.

Vulkan combines and extensively iterates on these characteristics as one new and uniquely powerful graphics API. And as the product of an incredible collaboration between many industry hardware and software vendors, Vulkan paves the way for a renaissance in cross-platform and cross-vendor PC games with exceptional performance, image quality and features.

STAY TUNED FOR MORE INFO

“Open” and “flexible” technologies are an essential piece of AMD’s DNA, and we have a long history in supporting those ideals. Our co-development of the Vulkan API through contributions like Mantle is another chapter in that open technology tale for AMD, an exciting evolution of Mantle, and a big step forward for PC gamers alike.

Stay tuned for more information on the specifics of Vulkan from the Khronos Group! We’ll be working hard to make it a fascinating story in the meantime.

Robert Hallock is the Head of Global Technical Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

*Originally posted by Robert Hallock in AMD Gaming on Mar 3, 2015 1:43:39 PM