AMD Wants Mantle On Linux, OS X, Mobile Devices

As part of the recent Radeon Rx 200 series and Hawaii GPU launch, AMD also unveiled Mantle as a new graphics rendering API to compete with OpenGL and Direct3D. AMD claims Mantle is easier, faster, and all-around better than OpenGL for game engines and other purposes. This week AMD has renewed their push that they want to see Mantle on Linux and other platforms.

There's been comments early on out of AMD that they would like to see the Mantle API supported on other platforms and it was reiterated this week during AMD's APU13 Developer Summit. AMD would like Mantle on Linux and Apple OS X as it would be significantly easier to do an efficient renderer with Mantle than OpenGL, according to AMD. Mantle also has uses beyond game-engines, reportedly in workstations and R&D too. One of the slides shared during the APU13 summit stated "Mantle + SteamOS = powerful combination!"

Beyond the Linux and Apple desktops and it already being available for Windows with the Catalyst driver on modern AMD hardware, the company would also like to see mobile devices support Mantle too. As mobile GPUs become more powerful, AMD thinks Mantle is a good fit for higher performance, more programmability, and being power efficient. Mantle could have opportunities on Android and iOS to compete with OpenGL ES.

For those concerned Mantle is for AMD's own drivers and hardware, it was stated again that Mantle is just a "think hardware abstraction" and could work with other hardware, is forward-compatible and provides extensions for architecture/platform-specific functionality. Mantle was also said again to be a more efficient graphics API for other vendors and that AMD wants to see "future versions of Mantle supported on all platforms and on all modern GPUs!"

For those wanting more details on the APU13 presentation about Mantle that also includes more low-level details about the graphics API, slides have been posted to Planet3Dnow.de. (For the non-German speakers, the slides themselves are still in English.)

In related news, AMD R9 290X Hawaii Linux benchmarks!