AMD Mantle!!New API improves performance??

[DanceswithUnix]

Right, that was what I meant by console +AMD PC market. But surely the advantage of such low level access to hardware is you squeeze the most out of the power available, which is going to be quite different between consoles and desktop GPUs, so to boost the PC version performance will still require quite a bit of extra work over the console (though not as much as creating an entirely new version of course).

I think the idea is to just not get in the way.

One thing does worry me though. I presume one source of speed on a console is to run the game as a kernel task, avoiding the user/kernel switch when handing data to the graphics driver? The quality of most games, I don't want them on ring 0 on my PC thank you.

[scaryjim]

... to boost the PC version performance will still require quite a bit of extra work over the console ....

Unless we're meant to accept console quality graphics on our PCs from now on, and having a faster graphics card will never get you better quality graphics?

We're well out of my knowledge of programming here, but would those API calls need rewriting? Would they not just be parameterised, so the console gets a fixed set of parameters, but the PC can change the parameters and get better quality graphics without changing the API calls?

[jigger]

Well the graphics driver will push the performance and faster GPU will always render quicker than a slower one. PC version ports might not get as much bang for buck as the console but this should unlock a lot more performance than we currently see.

[DanceswithUnix]

Seems Mantle is PC only, not console. Wonder if that really means Windows only.

http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/32...mantle-support

[sula]

Hmm. Yeah.

Well if AMD plan to bring Mantle over to Linux, then they really need to get their GPU Linux drivers better.

[kalniel]

Seems Mantle is PC only, not console. Wonder if that really means Windows only.

http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/32...mantle-support

Well consoles don't need mantle - they don't have the bloated abstraction layers that both windows and linux PCs have.