mantle is in a nutshell AMD's initiative to create a new programming model to
fully exploit the capabilities of modern gpus to improve graphics performance the
idea is to give developers the ability to have their game engines interact
directly with the hardware to reduce unnecessary overhead that is introduced
by other apis most developers who are embracing mantle seem to be particularly
fed up with the shortcomings and lack of innovation from microsoft with respect
to directx okay so it's better but there are a lot of questions that remain i
mean is this just plug and play what games does it work with well right now
mantle is supported only on Windows platforms and only in games that are
specifically coded to take advantage of it including battlefield 4 and star
citizen there is no Linux or steam os support for now and while there were
rumors early on that the xbox one and playstation 4 would support it that was
a misunderstanding mantle allows pc
developers to improve performance by letting them better control the graphics
hardware and by allowing them to use techniques that were previously limited
to console game development on the pc
that should in theory facilitate porting games from a console to a mantle enabled
pc but that doesn't mean that microsoft and sony's latest consoles support
mantle or really anything that closely related to it okay so how do you use it
well i mean have you ever had a game that supports both directx and opengl
rendering paths it'll have a drop down menu allowing you to choose the render
path you want mantle aims to be that simple select
which API you want to use fire up your game and enjoy the performance advantage
alright sounds great but hold on i've got a mantle supported game and the drop
down isn't there well every aspect of your system needs to support mantle you
will need a mantle compatible video card and mantel compatible driver to go along
with your mantle compatible game alright so i need an AMD graphics card for now
yes but AMD says it's designed mantle in
such a way that makes it applicable to a
range of modern GPU architectures so while it is a proprietary technology
right now AMD says they're planning to release mantle as an open specification
sometime in 2014 so stay tuned on that one
all right so why did AMD do all this work on their own rather than improve
what was already there and that is a great question and one that i'm actually
just gonna leave it to AMD dancer from their faq the design of mental was
driven by feedback from leading game developers who preferred the idea of a
fresh start with a new API to the extension and patching of existing ones
okay but what does that mean for directx and opengl
in reality for now nothing mantle is in its infancy and the industry could still
kind of tinker with it for a while and then leave it abandoned in a corner but
if instead the industry adopts it wholeheartedly or even just borrows
certain aspects of it and applies them to improving directx and opengl AMD
figures they can call the project a success so all right which leads us to the meat
of it you sat through the video how much of a performance improvement is there
with mantle and i'm sorry to disappoint you but unfortunately there's just too wide a
range to give you a straight up single answer different pc configurations will
behave in different ways but the general rule is that mantle will have the
biggest impact in CPU limited scenarios
particularly because of how much more efficiently it allows a game engine to
utilize a multi-core processor speaking
of multi-core processors hotspot shield whether you need to make yourself a bit
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plunge so check out the link in the video description to give it a shot like
this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment under
the video and let me know your thoughts on mantle i mean by the time you're
watching this video it could be a a year later in the landscape could have
completely changed so i'd love to keep the discussion up to date and as always
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