Well, you gotta love AMD and its engineers. Mantle looks – in paper – amazing, however that’s not the only thing the red team is currently working on. According to Graham Sellers, OpenGL guy at AMD, the red team will be supporting this open API with some high performance extensions that will offer almost similar performance to AMD’s upcoming API, Mantle.

As Sellers claimed, AMD aims to expose all of the hardware of their GPUs with these upcoming high performance extensions of OpenGL, and gamers will be able to get close to theoretical peak and performance. Not only that, but Sellers claimed that games using the modern versions of OpenGL won’t be bottlenecked by the API anymore, meaning that gamers will hit HW limits first.

Now if AMD delivers extraordinary performance improvements with those high value OpenGL extensions, we might see Direct 3D falling in the third place (for AMD cards). Mantle aims to be the best API for all GCN2.0 AMD cards, while OpenGL may be offering performance close to it. Naturally, this only applies to AMD’s cards, so it will be interesting to see what Nvidia’s answer will be to all of this.

Question is whether developers will start using OpenGL more frequently, especially now that Steam Machines are coming out. Moreover, will those extensions kick in automatically or will developers have to program their games in such a way that AMD’s extensions are being utilized?

Stay tuned for more, as we are really looking forward to see what will happen with this battle between the green and the red team.

Kudos to Reddit member ‘kontis’ for spotting it!