DirectX and OpenGL will start offering low-level access in order to reduce draw over

[Woodentop]

Good news, although i hope we dont have to wait for Windows 9

[DanceswithUnix]

This has reminded me of an old article: http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/13...ven-on-windows

Main points...

"Valve says that the Nvidia Linux driver lacked multithreading support — and once they added it to a later version of the driver, performance increased."

"Using these new OpenGL optimizations, the OpenGL version of L4D2 on Windows is now faster than the DirectX version. With the same hardware, Windows 7/OpenGL/L4D2 clocks in at 303.4 fps — compared to Windows 7/DirectX/L4D2 at 270.6 fps. In short: OpenGL is faster than DirectX."

So, OpenGL is multi threaded (something AMD admitted their DirectX driver isn't) and this leads to a performance improvement of 12%, about what we are seeing from Mantle.

[kalniel]

So, OpenGL is multi threaded (something AMD admitted their DirectX driver isn't) and this leads to a performance improvement of 12%, about what we are seeing from Mantle.

AMD's DX driver is multi-threaded (but doesn't have command lists and under current DX stack can't scale beyond a few threads.)

[DanceswithUnix]

AMD's DX driver is multi-threaded (but doesn't have command lists and under current DX stack can't scale beyond a few threads.)

OK, bad phrasing on my part, they said it didn't scale in the way that the Mantle driver did. Struck me as odd, like they were afraid of fixing it.
Didn't see any mention of what AMD's OpenGL driver was capable of though.