It was inevitable. Through a blog post on AMD’s website, the company’s Vice President of Visual and Perceptual Computing Raja Koduri has announced that Mantle has entered a transitional period. This follows an industry-wide shift of focus towards DirectX 12 and Next-Generation OpenGL. In effect, AMD has had its say about the importance of low-level APIs, and now it’s time to move towards future standards.
It goes without saying that AMD has acted as a spearhead with regards to low-level APIs. Until Mantle’s announcement, which happened at the launch of its 200 graphics card series, few people realized just how unoptimized current APIs were, and how much better things could be. It didn’t take long to realize that AMD was onto something, because months later, DirectX 12 was announced, and its goals were nearly verbatim with Mantle’s.
AMD stresses that this isn’t the end of Mantle, per se – but it’s hard to believe it’s not on its last legs. The company says that it will still support its partners that have committed to Mantle, and going forward, it’s going to “evolve beyond mastery of the draw call“.
At some point this month, AMD will be releasing a 450-page programming guide for Mantle here, which could aid developers who want to focus on low-level APIs, such as Mantle, even if they don’t use Mantle in its current form.
For those interested in which games supported Mantle (including some upcoming ones), here’s a list:
- Battlefield 4
- Battlefield Hardline
- Civilization: Beyond Earth
- Dragon Age: Inquisition
- Mirror’s Edge (2016)
- Need for Speed Rivals
- Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare
- Sniper Elite III
- Star Citizen
- Star Wars: Battlefront (2015)
- Thief
AMD has said that it’s less difficult to port a Mantle game to DirectX 12 than it is a DirectX 11 game to DirectX 12, so it seems likely that both the upcoming Mirror’s Edge and Star Wars: Battlefront will support DX12 at launch.