DirectX & OpenGL catching up with Mantle, will offer low-level access to reduce draw overhead

DSOGaming writes: "Huge news PC gamers. While Nvidia has not commented yet on supporting Mantle, it appears that both DirectX and OpenGL will be catching up with AMD’s API."

[UltimateMaster]

Regardless what you have this is good news.

[john2]

Yeap. This will please pretty much everyone. The question now is what hardware it will support, what OS and when the first games will be out (taking advantage of the new low-level access code)

[starchild]

It's funny, I just talked about this the other day and now they announce it.

Here's my comment:

"Yeah, although I have an AMD graphics card I really don't think that Mantle itself is going to end up taking over as the dominant API.

I believe what it WILL do is show the advantages of lower level optimizations and through competition result in a future version of the DirectX API with similar low level optimizations.

Over half the PC gaming market is using Nvidia graphics cards and even though it might be theoretically possible for Nvidia to use Mantle it's highly unlikely that they will.

Getting a better performing DirectX API instead of moving the entire industry over to a new API will be better for gamers anyway."
http://n4g.com/news/1461784...

[starchild]

Yeah, I predicted this a while back. I said that Mantle is neat, but I didn't believe that it would take over as the dominant API. Instead what we would see is that it would spur Microsoft to improve DirectX to provide lower level optimizations similar to Mantle.

I have an AMD card, but I would rather stick with what will have the most compatibility and present the fewest obstacles to backwards compatibility in the future.

[HighResHero]

Yes, but will their optimizations really offer the power and flexibility that mantle will bring to the table?

[Volkama]

I predicted the same thing. We're the best.

My take was that nVidia do not need to react to Mantle at all (as others were saying). They could sit back and wait, because the next iterations of DirectX will incorporate the good aspects of it anyway.

And so it it shall come to pass.

Now I can look forward to any games that might push the limits of my PC. My rig has the potential to benefit from these draw call improvements, if ever it gets pushed hard enough for a bottleneck to show itself :)

[ATi_Elite]

I expect Microsoft to pull another PUNK Move and ONLY offer the new low level DX in a Dx12 update that will only run on Window 8 or Win9.

Meanwhile looking forward to OpenGl moving along nicely.

Mantle while somewhat of a JOKE has made the industry stand up and actually do something that should of been done YEARS ago.

Good for the GAMERS!

[TheOmniGamer]

Awesome news, better performance for us PC gamers all around, my GTX 780 will be needing as much power as possible when Witcher 3 releases. I'm curious though, I'm no API expert, but with the XB1 using DX11.2, would this affect the XB1 as well in terms of performance?

Same would apply to PS4 using OpenGL, but I think PS4 uses it's own custom OpenGL API.

[Sy_Wolf]

It will have absolutely no effect on the Xbox One or the PS4. Since they are game consoles developers already have complete access to the hardware. This is only a new thing on the PC, consoles have had this from the very first one. That's the biggest benefit of having a completely closed platform.

[Anonagrog]

No, for all intents and purposes the console API's can be considered completely separate to the PC equivalents, so no changes will occur there.

The Xbox One uses a DirectX 11.2 variant dubbed '11.x', which is already a low-level api in itself. It's more likely to be vice versa, if anything, with the new pc api extensions to DX being influenced by the Xbox One's hardware access.

The PS4 is the same again, where it already runs an all new api providing low-level hardware access unlike that from OpenGL. In fact, it has two apis; a low-level one in a similar vein to the PS3's 'libGCM' api called 'GNM', and a slightly higher-level wrapper, 'GNMX', for ease-of-development. As you rightly pointed out, the PS4's api(s) are "custom", so the sorts of abstraction penalties we get with OpenGL/D3D on the PC would never have been a consideration to be factored out in the first place.

[Sy_Wolf]

HUZZAH!!!!

[stragomccloud]

Very nice.

[Somebody]

Now it's getting interesting.

[tee_bag242]

This is good news. This needs to happen.

[sungam3d]

Ugh, new Direct X version incoming?
This means a new shitty version of windows will be pushed onto us if we want to use the newer direct x, because you can be damn sure it wont come to Windows 7 because of 'compatibility issues'.

[RedDeadLB]

I'm more worried about it requiring new hardware instead of software.

[Orpheus]

Unified Memory - Coming in 2014 with next version of Maxwell. Given nVIDIAs deal with Fusion IO, it just might suck data directly from your SSD, bypassing the CPU and system memory.

Low Level API - Mantle and now DircetX and OpenGL are offering those advantages.

A good controller - The Steam Controller does the job more or less.

OS specialized for Gaming - Steam OS

With all the specific advantages of consoles coming to PCs.
The only reason to buy them may verily become only the exclusives, the number of which might just decrease.

[ninjahunter]

Well, im glad mantle managed to push the PC industry a little further. A free extra 15% in performance here I come!