Nvidia held an event this week in Montreal, where they held a live talk with John Carmack, Tim Sweeney and Johan Andersson. Members of the public could shout out questions and get information on the past, present and future of Nvidia, at least that was the plan until someone wanted to know what they thought of AMD’s Mantle API.
It’s safe to say the question made the green team uneasy, but I’m surprised they weren’t prepared for such a question as it did seem to throw them off guard. John Carmack gave the most positive response of the group, remarking that he does like the idea of offering PCs a console-like access level to the GPU, going as far as saying he would be tempted in supporting it, but that right now he wouldn’t go for such things.
Tim all but dismissed the idea, stating that it seemed like a bad idea to further stretch the number of APIs on the market, as optimization of games for multiple APIs could make it harder to sell PCs and the correct hardware for titles further down the line.
Johan was between the two on this one, agreeing with Tim on the API issue, but admitting that it is good for customers overall if it does offer performance improvements in games.
The debate continued to discuss the general difficulties between other APIs, as well as unified memory and other new features that are coming to market on both AMD and Nvidia hardware. For now, the ball is in Nvidia’s court and with Mantle set to shake up the GPU market a little, it will be interesting to see what moves Nvidia make in return.
Thank you DSO Gaming for providing us with this information.
Image courtesy of DSO Gaming.
Easy option, ditch crappy DX and use mantle instead. Two birds with one stone, removing horrible M$ limited API and replacing it with a nice open API that is unified across platforms and designed specifically for improved game performance. If it is programmed well then it can’t go wrong fingers crossed :p
Mantle was desinged for cgn/cgn 2.0 only its not a open api
Yeah my bad I ment to say universal not open. Making it so console and PCs are programmed the same way can only be a good thing as far as game development goes, instead of having to program differently for all 3.
What are yall talking about? Mantle is open.
Source:
http://www.techspot.com/news/54134-amd-unveils-revolutionary-mantle-api-to-optimize-gpu-performance.html
“We’ve been told at the GPU14 Tech Day event that the Mantle API is open, so theoretically Nvidia could purpose the technology in their GPUs”
mantle is cgn/cgn 2.0 only simple as that they cant develop something for amd to be open LOL
What about OpenGL, its completely open and “supports” linux. And that would give them a huge advantage if they started using that, because of the new steam os which is linux based.
yes but all of this is just bla bla bla for them amd tries to open up (well “open” since saying that mantle is open to a certain architecture in order to build more cgn from other companies..)and nvidia tries to close down more and more things..their shader editor was so far “open”to be shared with amd in order to make games playable in amd cards but now nvidia said that whoever choose them they will not share the game code with amd to be optimised..
so yeah fuck them big time they dont wanna learn from anything..
got slapped in mobile area by quallcomm
they went full arogant at the consoles resulting amd getting all of them and thus getting a shitload of leverage
they made g sync and vesa updated the refresh rate firmware with amd for every monitor
i will not be suprised if by the end of 2014 they will kick out their current ceo..
Nvidia if you dont support Mantle within the next 1 to 2 years i might be tempted to switch to AMD graphics cards, especialy if this takes off more within that time frame, it benefits everyone so ditch DX and support Mantle
Microsoft Plans to introduce its next Dx version which is 12 in several years so developers will ditch mantle and move with Dx12 but of course it will be Windows 8 or/and 9+ exclusive so you might need to update your OS as well.
I wouldn’t mind. I think it would be really nice if everyone ditches the CPU Requirement and 100% pour the workload into the GPU or perhaps keep some arithmetic operations like count bullet, damage, and other details to the CPU and give the graphic rendering part (everything including shadows) to the GPU
The problem here is if these companies continue to try to develop these “only supported on our hardware” features… there going to pigeon hole gamers into only buying games supporting their current hardware… and then down the line this will ultimately translate into higher video game prices because game developers are going to have to spend more time and money into supporting multiple features for multiple hardware configurations…
Depending on the success of Mantle, it’s in NVidia’s best interest to support Mantle and NOT try to create their own API.
As far as what Mantle does… I was under the impression Microsoft was trying to strip away the layers of abstraction and make DirectX work directly with the hardware seeing as how i had to buy a new video card to support DirectX 10, 11 & 11.1…