Maybe you have heard it, AMD (in corporation with DICE) has developed and announced a new low-level gpu api. Mantle.
As they say, mantle is heavily optimized and works on all GNC cards. Since AMD ships the gpu’s for all consoles the market share of Mantl might be big, and so the impact)
There are a few problems i see,
AMD seems not able to keep up with NV on already known library’s. I really guess it’s a flaw in the GNC architecture. There solution to provide a better API sounds good at first view, amd’s cards will benefit (as it seems, a lot).
The monkeys which played/developed in the 3dfx area probably know what benefits a custom api can have. The question is what NV is going to do, release their own api? Pushing OpenGL?
In future maybe different renderers, scene management is required, for each gpu vender. Welcome back in the 90’s.
More proof that technology never unifies but always diverges. Proprietary APIs are nothing new in this context, Nvidia had Cuda for a long time now. The reason in this case is obvious: AMD had to develop technology to give access to the new unified memory architecture used in the new consoles. Still the technologies developed on these specialized platforms often get integrated back in the existing APIs like OpenGL and CL as well as DirectX.
Yes I heard it yesterday, mantle will be used in the Frostbite-engine so I understand why DICE wanted it, huge head-start to them in their engine if it takes off. But I wonder if the other engines will use mantle. If not, it might end up being nothing more than a few months in the sun for DICE and we will hear AMD saying that of_course they are equally committed to OpenGL and DirectX also.
@normen said:
More proof that technology never unifies but always diverges.
If that were really the case, we’d all be coding in Java for AMD, Java for Intel, and Java for ARM. DirectX wouldn’t be on its way out but getting stronger by the day.
There’s always unifying and diversifying forces. Right now, AMD is pushing for diversification; we’ll see whether that’s strong enough to withstand the unifying forces.
@toolforger said:
If that were really the case, we'd all be coding in Java for AMD, Java for Intel, and Java for ARM. DirectX wouldn't be on its way out but getting stronger by the day.
There's always unifying and diversifying forces. Right now, AMD is pushing for diversification; we'll see whether that's strong enough to withstand the unifying forces.
Thanks for illustrating my example. As you say we in fact all code using Cocoa for Mac, Win32 (or whatever is the flavor of the day) on MS systems and glibc on Linux and every now and then Java integrates new paradigms from them while those systems work on being as integrated as Java. If the unifying force was stronger we’d code all applications in Java (or win32 for that matter) by now.