Mantle (API)
 |
|
| Developer(s) | AMD, DICE |
|---|---|
| Development status | Public development suspended |
| Operating system | Windows |
| Platform | x86 and x86-64 |
| Type | API for rendering |
| License | Proprietary & freeware |
| Website | www |
In computing, Mantle is a low-overhead rendering API targeted at 3D video games.AMD originally developed Mantle in cooperation with DICE, starting in 2013. Mantle was designed as an alternative to Direct3D and OpenGL, primarily for use on personal computers, although Mantle supports the GPUs present in the PlayStation 4 and in the Xbox One. According to AMD, Mantle will make a shift in focus after March 2015 to other areas since DirectX 12 and the Mantle-derived Vulkan API are largely replacing it in the gaming industry. Therefore, Mantle will be supported by AMD in neither the short term nor long term future, effectively making all future games unable to implement Mantle, and making Mantle unable to be implemented by any older games. While supported in drivers for two years, the Mantle API itself was not made public until March 2015.
The draw call improvements of Mantle help alleviate cases where the CPU is the bottleneck. The design goals of Mantle are to allow games and applications to utilize the CPUs and GPUs more efficiently, eliminate CPU bottlenecks by reducing API validation overhead and allowing more effective scaling on multiple CPU cores, provide faster draw routines, and allow greater control over the graphics pipeline by eliminating certain aspects of hardware abstraction inherent to both current prevailing graphics APIs OpenGL and Direct3D.
With a basic implementation, Mantle was designed to improve performance in scenarios where the CPU is the limiting factor:
Mantle is also designed to improve situations where high resolutions and “maximum detail” settings are used, although to a somewhat lesser degree, as these settings tax GPU resources in a way that is more difficult to improve at the API level. While Mantle provides some built-in features to improve GPU-bound performance, gains in these cases are largely dependent on how well Mantle features and optimizations are being utilized by the game engine. Some of those features include:
...
Wikipedia