Developers To Adopt AMD’s Mantle Graphics API

AMD has announced that three new developers turned their eye on Mantle API. Cloud Imperium Games, Eidos-Montréal, a part of the Square Enix Group, and Oxide Games, these three will join DICE and hopefully, for AMD’s sake, push the Mantle API to become a new popular API on the block.

AMD’s Mantle API is a new low-level API that should provide PC game developers an experience similar to the one on consoles. It will allow them to have a direct access to GPU features, rendering techniques and reduce CPU overhead, all on GCN-based GPUs. Although consoles are nowhere near the PC in terms of performance, games on consoles usually perform much better, mostly thanks to a low overhead OS that allows developer to pull a lot of hardware resources, while PCs are overwhelmed with complex APIs, OS and complex drivers.

Cloud Imperium Games developer will use the Mantle API in its “Star Citizen”, a crowd-funded PC space simulator with legendary game designer Chris Roberts behind the wheel. According to Roberts, AMD’s Mantle will allow them to extract more performance from AMD Radeon GPU than any other graphics API, which should be quite important considering that a game like Star Citizen is being designed with the need for massive GPU horsepower.

Eidos-Montréal is currently working on a new Thief game title, which is a first-person stealth adventure game set for release in February 2014. David Anfossi, studio head, Eidos-Montréal noted that Mantle lets them use AMD Radeon GPUs “the way they are meant to be used” unlocking many new opportunities and increased CPU and GPU performance.

Last but not the least is Oxide Games with its new “Nitrous” engine for 64-bit, multi-core processors. Dan Baker, co-founder of Oxide Games noted that AMD’s Mantle technology lets them get more out of the hardware than any other solution available. DICE was already backing up the Mantle API from day one and its Battlefield 4 will be one of the first games to feature it, at least when DICE issues the promised patch.

All three new developers will join DICE and speak about Mantle API architecture and implementation at the AMD Developer Summit scheduled for November 11th.

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