14 DAY TRIAL // Until now, there have still been some concerns in regards to using AMD's Mantle API for game development instead of DirectX, but a blog post from Advanced Micro Devices has just made mincemeat out of any and all worries.
You see, according to the Sunnyvale, California-based company the Mantle API can be easily ported to DirectX 12.
This is a really big deal. An application programming interface is, in essence, a programming language that software developers use to program a game.
Game developers are often stymied by funding restrictions, as well as time constraints. There are schedules to adhere to after all.
So, there might not be enough money or time to build a game on both the DirectX API and the Mantle that AMD released in late 2013.
But now AMD says that these concerns don't really apply. For one thing, as long as you have a Windows PC, any Mantle game will work. It's just that Radeon graphics cards will make the titles run better (Mantle uses the Graphics Core-Next architecture best).
More importantly, however, the Sunnyvale company has revealed that it's easy to port from Mantle into DirectX 12.
It has even published a White Paper, 14 pages long, where all the features and structure of the API are described.
So, we suppose that the big question has finally been answered: would it be wise for game developers to design their games in Mantle instead of DirectX 11 between now and the launch of DirectX 12.
In short, yes, because any render can be ported with very little effort to DX12. And you don't even need to keep both rendering backends if you don't want to. You can eliminate one or the other.
“Above all, Mantle will present developers with a powerful shortcut to DirectX 12, as the lingual similarities between APIs will make it easy to port a Mantle-based render backend to a DirectX 12-based one if needed or desired. In addition, Mantle developers that made the bold decision to support our historic API will be well-educated on the design principles DirectX 12,” the company writes in that blog post we mentioned before.
In layman terms, all this means that Advanced Micro Devices stands to make lots of money from licensing payouts and the like. It also means that games over the next few years might run a fair bit better on AMD hardware than on NVIDIA.
It's a pretty interesting counterpoint to the acidic “debate” that NVIDIA and AMD have been locked in recently, due to how NVIDIA's improvements in Watch Dogs also sabotage AMD's video boards.
NVIDIA has since called AMD “crazy” for even thinking that, but it was still a pretty nasty exchange between the two. Now let`s see if this latest development regarding Mantle adds any extra tension (you get three guesses, and the first two don't count).