Huge news PC gamers. While Nvidia has not commented yet on supporting Mantle, it appears that both DirectX and OpenGL will be catching up with AMD’s API. According to some slideshows from this year’s GDC, both DirectX and OpenGL will start offering low-level access in order to reduce draw overhead. This obviously translates to performance gains on older CPUs, something that will definitely excite PC gamers.

Here are some quotes from the DirectX and OpenGL presentations that will take place in GDC 2014:

“In this session we will discuss future improvements in Direct3D that will allow developers an unprecedented level of hardware control and reduced CPU rendering overhead across a broad ecosystem of hardware.” “For nearly 20 years, DirectX has been the platform used by game developers to create the fastest, most visually impressive games on the planet. However, you asked us to do more. You asked us to bring you even closer to the metal and to do so on an unparalleled assortment of hardware. You also asked us for better tools so that you can squeeze every last drop of performance out of your PC, tablet, phone and console.” “Driver overhead has been a frustrating reality for game developers for the entire life of the PC game industry. On desktop systems, driver overhead can decrease frame rate, while on mobile devices driver overhead is more insidious–robbing both battery life and frame rate. In this unprecedented sponsored session, Graham Sellers (AMD), Tim Foley (Intel), Cass Everitt (NVIDIA) and John McDonald (NVIDIA) will present high-level concepts available in today’s OpenGL implementations that radically reduce driver overhead–by up to 10x or more. The techniques presented will apply to all major vendors and are suitable for use across multiple platforms. Additionally, they will demonstrate practical demos of the techniques in action in an extensible, open source comparison framework.”

It is still unknown when the first DirectX and OpenGL games will take advantage of these new techniques. It will be also interesting to see whether Microsoft will pull another DX10 on PC gamers and make DX12 (or the version that will offer low-level access) exclusive to Windows 8.

Still, we are really looking forward to see whether the new versions of DirectX and OpenGL will be able to compete with Mantle.

Kudos to NeoGAF’s member ‘Dictator93’ for spotting them.

Stay tuned for more!