AMD’s Mantle: The biggest innovation in gaming since DX 9 says Extremetech

There’s been a lot of talk recently about AMD’s latest technology and I find there are some valid opinions about why Mantle has some worrying trends for the GPU industry with some of the bad old habits creeping up to latest trends in GPU technological development. John Gillooly had a look at this topic in some detail in his article named “The seismic shift facing Nvidia and AMD”. John is a veteran IT/gaming/enthusiast journo that has been there and done that so to speak. It is concerning when someone with such a broadminded view and experience notices a change in the industry that could be detrimental to the end users long term.

That brings me to also mention an article Extremetech has put up recently in which they argue AMD Mantle is the biggest innovation in gaming since DX9 (DirectX 9) which is incidentally the sort of proprietary tech John’s article refers to. Is it really time to let go of DirectX and bypass it completely and develop API that will let games directly interact with GPUs? There probably is but should the big players push for open standard rather than proprietary tech? I think it’s probably in their interest judging by what happened in the past.

The idea behind AMD Mantle is pretty interesting, particularly for the under powered PCs as DirectX was more of an impediment as it created extra overhead in performance and decreased vital FPS so the systems that were used based on AMD Kaveri FM2+ gained the highest FPS when Mantle was enabled while more powerful Intel based system based on GIGABYTE Z87X-D3H and Intel 4770K saw smaller gains with single cards. Basically Mantle untapped the unused frames in a struggling AMD CPU based system by a larger margin.



There was a change once Extremetech ran crossfire and Intel 4770K was just exceptionally fast and was capable of minimising the bottleneck and had better results overall. This would probably change once a third or forth GPU was added in the mix and I’m sure once Mantle matures, people with 3/4way GPU systems and air/water cooled CPUs will be able to untap the heavy bottleneck modern GPUs have. Being early days there was also some mention of irregularities with graphics quality but I am sure a lot of it will get ironed out sooner or later.



Great tech, just wish it was pushed for open standard so that everyone can enjoy, not just people that purchase AMD based GPUs!