AMD Ready to Provide Mantle Support for PS4 and Xbox One; Could Push Performance of Both Further

Giuseppe Nelva March 28, 2014 6:45 PM EST

There has been a lot of discussion lately on the possibility of AMD’s Mantle to be used to improve the performance of PS4 and Xbox One like it did for certain games on PCs using AMD video cards, and today AMD Senior Director of Global Software Alliances Neal Robison explained that something can indeed be done during the Q&A Session of a press conference held in Tokyo.

According to the report by PC Watch Robison mentioned that consoles have a fixed architecture unlike PCs, but can be extended via software. Mantle can be used for both sides (PS4 and Xbox One), but its use will depend on Sony and Microsoft. Robison continued by saying that for now everything is at a potential level, but the performance of the two consoles could be raised one step further if it’ll be realized.

The report by 4Gamer includes further details, mentioning that AMD is ready to provide Mantle support for PS4 and Xbox one, but again its use will be at the discretion of Microsoft and Sony Computer Entertainment. In addition to this game developers could also use the Mantle API as a foundation for their games and have some of its benefits work across PC, PS4 and Xbox One since both consoles are based on an AMD APU. Mantle can be used transversely on all three platforms, especially with CryEngine and Frostbite that have the API included at the engine level.

We reached out to AMD requesting further details on this, and we’ll update if we’ll receive new information. That said, it’ll definitely be interesting to see how far AMD will manage to push Mantle and if console manufacturers will decide to adopt its features.

Update: we received an official statement from AMD in response to our inquiry, confirming that AMD is ready to share Mantle with its console partners if they express the will to use it:

Neal talked about the fact that Mantle is intended for use on Radeon graphics in a PC. However, we said that Mantle was designed from the beginning to be extensible to other platforms, as well. AMD stands ready to share the technology with our [console] partners should they choose to want it.

Basically, the ball is in Sony and Microsoft’s field. We’ll have to see if they’ll decide to run to the goal with it.