AMD Releases More Information on New Mantle API

By Ken Brown

amd-logo_678x452In a blog post released today, AMD discusses their new low level graphics API, Mantle. AMD plans a longer presentation on Mantle next month at the APU13 Developer Summit, but discussed the founding principles and objectives of this new API. Many people have been wondering if the AMD Mantle was just vaporware and this looks to a very detailed and thoughtful response from AMD. We re-posted some of the entry below, but be sure to head over to AMD to check out the blog post for yourself!

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Last month at our unveiling of the AMD Radeon R9 and R7 Series GPUs, we announced a technology called Mantle. Mantle is poised to revolutionize graphics performance on PCs by giving developers low-level access to PC graphics hardware for the very first time.

From a mile-high perspective, Mantle is the harmony of three essential ingredients:

  1. A thin driver within the AMD Catalyst software suite that allows applications to speak directly to the Graphics Core Next architecture.
  2. A Graphics Core Next-enabled graphics chip, such as the AMD Radeon R9 Series, R7 Series or HD 7000 Series GPUs.
  3. And an application or game engine written to utilize the Mantle SDK, such as the Frostbite 3 engine within Battlefield 4.

Working in concert, these three ingredients provide a complete hardware/software stack thats able to take advantage of an incredibly efficient and low-overhead rendering pipeline. To put a fine point on it, Mantle is a graphics language thats symbiotic with the Graphics Core Next architecture, which developers can use to augment their game engine for ideal performance on that architecture.