hmm, a new competitor to DirectX / OpenGL, or another gimmick that no one will support? Mantle offers the temptation of the specialized-hardware era of console programming, on your PC, with similar gains over more generalized chips of that era.
http://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations/software-technologies/mantle
The problems AMD have are basically: 1. Struggling to maintain relevance, and 2. A heavily entrenched AAA games industry which might not give a crap about this if it means heavy codebase fragmentation, or worse, provide lazy ports which don't take advantage of its benefits.
NVidia's response to the whole thing appears to be finding games which support this new API, and provide their own tweaks specific to these games in their own driver so that they appear to run faster on various benchmark tests. Hmmmm! Gaming the system a bit there, but you can google those results for yourself (driver 337.50 Beta)
Thoughts? Beginning of a new era, or an evolutionary dead-end?
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