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AMD’s idea of offering programmers and developer’s low-level access and more efficient ways of using the GPU seems to be a great one. This for most is old news and whether you have an AMD or not, this is great news. Two older but still very relevant API’s (1 more than the other) are following along big red’s footsteps.
Microsoft’s DirectX and The Khronos Groups (TKG) OpenGL (Originally owned by SGI) will be joining in on the direct hardware access. Announcements are said to be prepared for the Game Developer’s Conference 2014 (GDC) by AMD, Intel and NVIDIA, yeah Intel will be there too. It seems like they all will be fighting for a piece of the action, no matter which one you are rooting for it seems like all 3 will win and with that we all win.
Only one game is taking advantage of Mantle (Battlefield 4) and very soon Thief (Does not support Mantle at launch, but will sometime in March). It seems like everyone will need to adapt to this new landscape of coding goodness. CPU bottlenecks are even more now becoming a thing of the past and now with these technologies, hopefully will be closer to 1% than ever before. AMD, Intel and NVIDIA state that this will reduce driver overhead by up to 10x or more and will show these techniques in action in some demos during GDC.
Microsoft and TKG as stated previously are joining up to update their API’s but NVIDIA it seems has not outright declared how it will combat this, maybe joining up with the other 2? Maybe NVIDIA will ride on the coat tails of MS’ and TKG’s for now and further improve upon its PhysX (CUDA) architecture, which is not only good for gaming but for computing as well. Will AMD still use OpenCL now that Mantle has arrived?
What do you guys think about this?
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I have spent many years in the PC boutique name space as Product Development Engineer for Alienware and later Dell through Alienware’s acquisition and finally Velocity Micro. During these years I spent my time developing new configurations, products and technologies with companies such as AMD, Asus, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA and more. The Arts, Gaming, New & Old technologies drive my interests and passion. Now as my day job, I am an IT Manager but doing reviews on my time and my dime.