Interesting times ahead for game developers. No doubt, nVidia will come back with an answer but this is a strong and bold move from Ati. Expect Unity tech heads to dig around here in the coming months.
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Pretty cool, but I canāt keep up any more.
But do we really need DX and OpenGL as much? Back when there were a lot of different graphics cards, it made sense. But with just two, it makes more sense to work closer with the hardware. I am sure nVidia will find an answer for this.
Of course OpenGL would still be cool for everything else like mobile. But this is hard to ignore since ATI pretty much āownā all the new consoles, including wii. This basically means you can have console style optimisations on the desktop which is relevant if youāre porting from console.
What? Just twoā¦ What about Intel GPUs that are starting to power most laptops?
A cooler thing would be if Apple made something like Mantle since they have full control over the hardware, a move that could make macs more capable gaming devices without raw power.
Its also worth thinking of Sony and Ms in this since I doubt they want anything that could make there turds look more turd like 
And MS seems determined for PC to become a casual platformā¦
two: double the work.
We was able to do the same things with constructor specific opengl extension. But no one do it (except carmackā¦) too much work even for big studio.
This is more an attempt to weaken NVIDIA position than anything else.
While no doubt a benefit for console developers who probably drove the demand for such an API given the dominant position AMD now has on consoles, I question whether it will have any relevance in the world of PC/Mac game development and therefore the vast majority of Unity developers.
Potentially good news for the handful of latest generation console developers using Unity though a few years from now.
Doesnāt this get in the way of future compatibility?
It means weād have console style optimisations on the desktop if the user has a (supported) AMD card. Ditto with nVidiaās system - because theyāre not going to become BFFs with AMD, and I imagine after losing the console business theyāll do everything possible to spite them, most likely by pushing their mobile tech forward full-throttle seeing as thatās only place where the market is actually growing. And of course, they have other competitors there - even Intelās GPU chipsets are finally receiving less scorn than usual.
Regardless, I think thereās a bigger problem. Historically standards can be very slow to spread, even when thereās an obvious existing target market. CUDA was released in 2006, and while itās put to good use in very high end commercial circles (mostly academic and/or science related), very few consumer games or applications have adopted it - even Adobe, who were one of the early adopters, switched very quickly to OpenCL. I expect they had no choice, because Macs were playing musical chairs with nVidia and ATI cardsā¦and of course, OpenCL was Appleās baby. The lesson there is that, āOpenā makes a lot more business sense if it means write-once-publish-many.
I should say that Iām not really such a luddite at heart - Iād have gone all cream pie ten years ago at stuff like this, but these days I find more is less and less is more.
Bear in mind that even if GCN takes off big time, we still have to support every other solution. This is, and always has been, the nature of PC development; there is no cure for desktop syndrome. (perhaps short of dropping a Snake Pliskin style EMP and starting overā¦).
Well, the reason I use Unity is so I donāt have to fart around with the above. But 9x draw calls?
Thereās something seductive about bare-metal programming and complicated shaders and physically accurate lighting and on and onā¦
I geek out for this stuff too but we arenāt creating any long-term value with any of it. Basic art principles, like making better colour choices, would sell far more games than rendering something two frames faster.
Iāve seen artists de-valued a lot since 2008 and I think thereās a void from a lack of full-time art talent on teams. The void is getting filled with equations and gimmicks.
I can save you $1000 a month on car insuranceā¦ I just have to make some big assumptions about your current car insurance :). The 9X number is marketing BS designed to cause people to make some really wrong assumptions. Bypassing API overhead does not mean that your GPU can actually draw those calls any faster, and draw call overhead is hardly crippling us in modern PCs, especially with modern multithreaded renders.
Itās all subjective, whether or not this kind of thing is worth the development time, but I see it as a transparent power play by AMD since they have a dominant presence in this console generation. However, they have less than a third of the PC marketplace and shrinking, so not all that helpful for PC devs or consumers, and since all signs point towards Mantle not being used on consoles, Iād say their power play failed.
No, it means due to direct access you donāt need to use the CPU. These are calls you can do on the GPU that arenāt readily available under DX / OGL, which means you donāt have to keep going from CPU to GPU. Hence a ton more draw calls. Marketing BS? well battlefield has clearly bought into it. It also happens in other games such as tomb raiderās tress fx (which runs really badly on nvidia cards).
Like the latest battlefield for instance? and john carmack being enthused by it on twitter? Cool.
Hereās Mantle being discussed by Tim Sweeney, John Carmack and Johan Andersson (lol @8:48 ):
A light sprinkling of tepid, if not quite cold, waterā¦
āMantle is NOT in consoles. What Mantle creates for the PC is a development environment thatās similar to the consolesā
Even with just one I can see a lot of reason to abstract over the GPU and not go direct - doubt this will have a huge impact to end users of graphics engines such as us :).
What I heard is carmack saying is it probably wouldnāt be worth the effort, and as he said, OGL has had vendor specific extensions forever. The battlefield guys may have assumed/hoped Mantle would be embraced by Sony/MS when they started it, regardless, theyāre a drop in the bucket.