Nvidia Speak Their Mind About Mantle

In a recent podcast from MaximumPC, Nvidia finally spoke out about AMD’s Mantle and best we can tell, they couldn’t care less about it. Nvidia Engineer Tom Petersen and Senior Director of Engineering Rev Lebaradian were on hand to discuss the topic and according to them, there are no big benefits from using it (mantle).

What is interesting is here at eTeknix know for a fact there are tangible benefits to using Mantle, but Nvidia may just be down playing the gains to save their own asses, especially given that they’ll be pegging their performance gains on DirectX12, which is likely capable of rendering Mantle obsolete.

“We don’t know much about Mantle, we are not part of Mantle. And clearly if they see value there they should go for it. And if they can convince game developers to go for it, go for it. It’s not an Nvidia thing. The key thing is to develop great technologies that deliver benefits to gamers. Now in the case of Mantle it’s not so clear to me that there is a lot of obvious benefits there.”

“It’s possible to pull performance out of DirectX, we’re approving that, and so you can argue that maybe it’s not a good idea to put extra effort into yet another API that does the same thing essentially. Feature wise there is nothing more.”

“DX12 is coming and a lot of the features, the benefits of having a lower level API (the extra calls and stuff), it’s going to be in DX12.”

From what we’ve seen, Mantle can really pull a lot of benefits for slower hardware, although if you’ve got a GTX 780Ti or R9 290X powered system, gaining a few FPS is hardly going to be noticeable for you anyway. Ball is in your court Nvidia, time to stop talking and get your API in line, then we’ll see if Mantle really is a waste of time.

Thank you MaximumPC for providing us with this information.