14 DAY TRIAL // Many were skeptical back in late 2013, when AMD introduced the Mantle application programming interface and said it would be better than DirectX 11 (and further iterations) in every way. That's no longer the case.
Sure, some gamers might still scrunch their eyebrows at the idea, but game makers are actually very much on board with the API's promises of better performance and visuals.
Indeed, where there used to be only one game (Battlefield 4) and a demo or two, now there are over a dozen unreleased games that have been confirmed to work in Mantle.
And they aren't small games that are played for laughs. We're looking at big titles and upcoming bestsellers like Dragon Age: Inquisition, Star Wars: Battlefront, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Battlefield: Hardline, and Sid Mayer's Civilization: Beyond Earth.
Star Citizen, The Sims 4, Dying Light, Star Control, and Offworld Trading Company are on the list as well, as are the untitled Mirror's Edge and Mass Effect games. There's even a completely unknown game confirmed for AMD Mantle support.
AMD's partnership with EA/DICE and Oxide Game has definitely paid off, as the Sunnyvale, California-based corporation has essentially signed contracts with Bioware, Maxis, Techland, Cloud Imperium Games, and many others.
Come late 2014, we will have three to four times as many Mantle games selling than there are right now (Battlefied 4, Thief, Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare, and Sniper Elite 3 – though the last one's Mantle support hasn't been enabled yet).
There is another group of upcoming titles that may support Mantle, but for which the confirmation has not yet arrived. They are Homefront: The Revolution, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Elite: Dangerous, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Lichdom: Battlemage, Sleeping Dogs: Triad Wars, Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris, Grand Theft Auto V, and Alien: Isolation (which, apparently, will feature Ellen Ripley and the original cast of the first film via pre-order DLC).
Application Programming Interfaces specify how some software components should interact with each other. They allow programs (in this case games) to access databases or computer hardware (HDDs, video cards, RAM) and can make the job easier for programming graphical user interface components.
We've covered AMD's Mantle API quite extensively since September 2013. We have little doubt that this long list of to-be-supported games is at least in part owed to the ever so convenient fact that Mantle games can be easily ported to DirectX when needed (or will be ported to DirectX 12, when it comes out).
