AMD Restructuring
AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) announced earlier this week at the Game Developer Conference that its Mantle API would be discontinued and suggested developers focus on Direct X 12 or OpenGL instead.
“Proud moments also call for reflection, and today we are especially thoughtful about Mantle’s future,” AMD’s vice president of visual and perceptual computing, Raja Koduri, said in a statement. “In the approaching era of DirectX 12 and the Next-Generation OpenGL Initiative, AMD is helping to develop two incredibly powerful APIs that leverage many capabilities of the award-winning Graphics Core Next (GCN) Architecture.”
AMD said that the Mantle 1.0 API will not be released to the public, however it will be releasing a 450-page API reference and guide on Mantle to interested parties.
But AMD also said that this would not be the end of Mantle per se.
“Mantle must take on new capabilities and evolve beyond mastery of the draw call. It will continue to serve AMD as a graphics innovation platform available to select partners with custom needs,” Koduri wrote in his post.
One direction the underlying technology behind Mantle could go is to be the foundation of future APIs. That’s already the case with the Khronos Group, as it recently announced that Mantle will serve as the underlying foundation of its OpenGL-based API Vulkan.
While AMD faced an uphill battle with getting its API as it lacked the support of Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) or Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), it did get a number of software publishers to commit to support it for upcoming titles. That should be counted as a success.
