AMD's Riche Corpus has told the industry that the highly anticipated Mantle API will eventually be widely available, with the hope that it will one day become an industry standard.
Despite this, as it stands the Mantle API revealed at last month's GPU14 event will only be available on certain titles, such as the upcoming partnership between AMD and DICE for Battlefield 4...
Not Every Card Is Currently Supported, But Hopefully AMD Will Sort This Out Soon Not Every Card Is Currently Supported, But Hopefully AMD Will Sort This Out Soon
Corpus has previously been heavily critical of proprietary features stating: “The plan is, long term, once we have developed Mantle into a state where it’s stable and in a state where it can be shared openly [we will make it available]. The long term plan is to share and create the spec and SDK and make it widely available. Our thinking is: there’s nothing that says that someone else could develop their own version of Mantle and mirror what we’ve done in how to access the lower levels of their own silicon. I think what it does is it forges the way, the easiest way.”
If the Mantle API stays proprietary the feature lives and dies based upon the manufacturer's success, and likely would not be widely available and diverse across different devices. This would not be a successful innovation, but of course there are several options that can rectify a situation such as this.
A modern example of such an occurrence is NVidia’s own PhysX, a proprietary realtime physics engine that had the potential to make its mark on the industry as a whole. However, that opportunity has faded, with the advances of OpenGL it seems that PhysX has lost its flair and could eventually fizzle out.
That very outcome is what happened to 3DFX’s Glide API back in the nineties. Instead of being an industrial benchmark, 3DFX set its stool out to be proprietary, and eventually died due to a dwindling number of devices ever making use of the ill-fated API.
It seems AMD has learned from the mistakes of the past, and has decided to make the Mantle API the benchmark for electronics incorporating GPU’s.
Source: game-debate
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