Hi guys, I’m following this tread from the beginning and I just wanted to share something.
The comment is not technical and is a little bit long but the “Mantle hole” might be a little bit deeper. Just scroll to the end if you’re not interested in the opinion of a just registered user. The bellow is just my experience an idea and pure speculations tbh.
The constantly quoted “AMD does not have the GPU market share” thing…is irrelevant now and will be irrelevant in the, not so long, long term as well. Mantle is not about current market share but influencing future decisions when developing/purchasing a GPU and CPU. Most of you, of course, know that. For me personally, it’s the future proof capabilities that might be given to me through Mantle.
1. Assume that we are reaching the limits in shrinking process and the positives of die shrinks are rapidly decreasing. What if there is a serious possibility that this limit will be reached long before the new breakthrough in computing? The short term solution is to make full use of the capabilities of the current hardware, not to mention that the need for more powerful computers is growing as oppose to the hardware sales. Those optimizations are supposed to give us more time, since you cannot constantly make new architectures and new architectures might soon not be possible. So, there is the limit in current technology.
2. The increase in R&D costs (for everything) even now can be considered high as hell, which reflects on price, sales and respectively the adoption of new hardware. Please note, that the full costs cannot be automatically transferred to the customer (there is a subjective and objective limit) not to mention that this will further stagnate the market. So, there is cost related to adopting more powerful hardware.
There is a 3 and 4….simply the above is a long story with many connections to other areas so I’ll stop here.
How this affects devs. Well you have those game (and other) engines that show you how beautiful everything looks but you cannot actually implement in a game and with the small you have implemented in the game even smaller number of gamers will see. And this has nothing to do with the market share of Nvidia or AMD (or Intel). It’s one thing to see that Titan will drive that game at certain (not maxed out) settings and another is when you sit at your PC.
Now, devs are seeing the slow adoption of new hardware on one hand and on the other they see that the majority of gamers do not have high-end gaming rigs to start with. Thus new games do not meet our expectations and every game looks the same. This of course hurts sales (and not only sales). At the same time, the same developers are being held back by the hardware so, there are two things they can do. Keep the current quality (make hard but small optimizations just to include new reflections on the water ) heading to nowhere or request help for optimizing the use of current hardware.
AMD said, that this is something that developers (certainly not all, but some with vision) wanted for years. And they have not requested it from AMD specifically, that’s for sure. The problem with this is that companies such as Intel, Nvidia and AMD will never sit on one table and make a unified architecture, so that developers are eased. Here it comes back to Intel, AMD, Nvidia etc. to do something but again you see actions from no one and fears by everybody. This is where cojones and long term vision starts to matter, as there are only two outcomes. Failing or succeeding.
DirectX has been bloated for years and will not change that in a day. It only makes my heat output higher and I do believe that Microsoft knows that DirectX (as it is now) is going nowhere, plus…It doesn’t actually matter what Microsoft thinks - likes or dislikes. What matters is that certain people are seeing beyond the current status quo and it’s clear that someone has to start this change.
We know that AMD has had problems in the past and even in the present. Drivers, hardware…but truth to be told no company is immune to that. The Will to change that is what matters and most importantly vision. Somehow AMD ended in the better position and saw this as an opportunity.
What Mantle brings to the table will soon be unveiled and I am not going speculate on that, but I’m sure that AMD will throw a lot to make Mantle worth it. And worth it not for the “Titan” type of guys, as their souls are already lost. If I have 200 bucks in my pocket, it would be nice if I can buy a card and game, right?
Some developers have seen the demo presentation and know what Mantle is capable of some have jumped onboard, the rest….they’ll wait and see what others have done with it

Since we already have some devs to support Mantle I’ll put it this way. You will not see a company pushing on a technology so hard, if the possibility of failure is larger than the possibility of success. And you almost certainly will not see a dev supporting Mantle if there is a large possibility of failure or there are large costs related to it.
No one wants to perform a public hara-kiri.
What drives my confidence and hope is that some of the most innovative ideas came from AMD, so they just might have an idea to combine the request from developers with something….they have been developing for a while.
ex. What if, just if, Mantle brings something extra? Not at the beginning, as you cannot implement everything you want at once. Hey, yesterday the GPU was only showing you pictures on the screen, right.
You all must have noticed how AMD is moving in direction of Heterogeneous computing and everything the company does is connected to HSA. Is it possible that Mantle is the start of a larger unification? There are not only games you know
Will AMD succeed? Well time will tell. Is it worth to try? Definitely!
P.S. For those that constantly point to the market share of Nvidia, Intel, AMD - The market has a nasty habit of being uncertain! I’ll just point to you the almighty Nokia and Blackberry
(I am an economist who does not work for AMD, I just like markets

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