The shade of things to come

Update (15/10/2013): Microsoft has just announced via an official blog post that the Xbox One will not support Mantle as a programming API.


At GPU14 AMD announced the new Mantle low-level API for their GCN architecture. Anandtech has a pretty good analysis of the presentation, along with some insights of what Mantle could mean for the GPU market.

The announcement left me shocked, but not because I was not expecting such a move; far from it. Actually I had foresaw this some months ago, and I was pleased to see that I got pretty much every detail right... Except for one. A very crucial one.

The landscape above Mantle

We still know very little about the Mantle API.  AMD claims it will allow developers to implement performance critical sections closer to the metal on their GCN chips, without the performance penalty of higher level APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D.

AMD claims that this is a growing need from graphic developers, and I totally copy that; with the "G" in GPU progressively shifting from meaning "Graphics" to mean "Generic", the abstraction gap between OpenGL and the underlying architecture has gradually grown.

Also, AMD is in an interesting market position nowadays, as both the Microsoft Xbox One and the Sony Playstation 4 will feature a GPU based on their GCN architecture.  The Nintendo Wii U hosts an AMD GPU as well, but it's not based on GCN.

The Mantle API is thus intended to squeeze every last graphics performance drop from Xbox One, Playstation 4 and PCs equipped with a AMD GPU, and making porting between these platform easier.

Could the Mantle API be implemented for other GPUs as well?  Probably not while maintaining its intended prime focus on efficiency: from what it can be inferred from the AMD presentation, the Mantle API is strictly tied to the GCN architecture.

History repeating?

The history of graphics programming has a notable precedent of a platform-specific API: Glide.  It was a low-level API that exposed the hardware of the 3dfx Voodoo chipset, and for a long time it was also the only way to access its functionalities.  Thanks to 3dfx' hardware popularity, Glide was widespread, with Glide-only game releases not being uncommon.

While the Mantle API is as platform-specific as Glide was, the present context is much different: OpenGL and Direct3D are now mature, and the ultimate purpose of the new project is likely to complement existing APIs, offering a fast path for critical sections, rather than replacing them.

The other side of today's gaming

It's clear that AMD is trying to leverage its position as a GPU supplier across the PC and console markets.  However, there's another GPU vendor that is going to be in a similar position in the near future: earlier this year, in a SIGGRAPH event that suprisingly got very little press, NVIDIA demonstrated its own Kepler GPU architecture running on Tegra 5, their next generation low power SoC aimed to mobile devices.

So, both vendors have one foot in the PC market, while keeping the other one in the console market for AMD and in the mobile one for NVIDIA.  This is far from being a balanced situation, because console market has shrunk massively during the last years, and the momentum is on mobile gaming right now.  Asymco has a detailed summary of the current situation, along with some speculation about the future I don't fully agree with.

If NVIDIA manages to be a first choice for Steam Boxes, as it's clearly trying to be, and put the Tegra 5 on a relevant base of mobile devices, the Kepler architecture would become the lingua franca between PC and mobile gaming, as much as AMD hopes GCN to do between PC and console gaming.

At that point introducing a platform specific API, both to offer developers the extra edge on their hardware and to lock out competitors, starts to make a lot of sense.

In the end, that was the detail I got wrong: the vendor that API would come from first :)