AMD Mantle May Be Dead

AMD Mantle May Be Dead

| Source: AMD Author: Mark Campbell

AMD Mantle May Be Dead

AMD Mantle may be dead in the water, as AMD tell devs to look at DirectX 12 and the newly announced Vulcan API from the KHRONOS Group for Mantle 1.0 Functionality. AMD have said that they will no longer release the Public Mantle 1.0 SDK, as they originally claimed.

AMD has also released a 450 page API programming guide, which references many of the design decisions that AMD has made with Mantle. AMD hopes that this will lead to discussion and the generation og even greater graphical APIs in the future

AMD have not said that they are finished with mantle but they do say this;

"The Mantle SDK also remains available to partners who register in this co-development and evaluation program. However, if you are a developer interested in Mantle "1.0" functionality, we suggest that you focus your attention on DirectX® 12 or GLnext (now called Vulcan)."

“Mantle must take on new capabilities and evolve beyond mastery of the draw call. It will continue to serve AMD as a graphics innovation platform available to select partners with custom needs,”



The future of AMD's Mantle API is not clear, but to be frank it may have already served it's purpose. The development of DirectX 12 and Vulcan have undoubtedly been heavily influenced by Mantle, both have focused on the main inefficiencies of OpenGL and DirectX 11 which Mantle had addressed, so now is maybe the time for AMD to back away from the API game.

We also need to remember how well KHRONOS' Vulcan API can work for AMD, the KHRONOS group had been given the Mantle API's source code to aid in the development of Vulcan, which could make the API work very similarly to Mantle. We also need to consider how Vulcan's SPIR-V language frontend is the same as that of OpenCL, which is another thing that AMD supports. The Vulcan API may be exactly what AMD wants from an API.

Without the support of Nvidia, AMD's Mantle API was not destined to be a default API for game development. With DirectX 12 and Vulcan on their way the problems posed by traditional Graphics API's will be a thing of the past.

AMD will continue to support developers that are currently working on Mantle projects with their full resources.

You can join the discussion on the Death of AMD's Mantle API, as we know it, on the OC3D Forums.

Special thanks to Kambo for first posting this on the forums.

AMD Mantle may be dead in the water, as AMD tell devs to look at DirectX 12 and Vulcan. http://t.co/J6HpbdpFLW pic.twitter.com/uwuY9rkRl9 — OC3D (@OC3D) March 3, 2015

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