On MaximumPCMagazine’s latest podcast, Nvidia finally took a stance on AMD’s Mantle. MaximumPCMagazine invited Nvidia’s Distinguished Engineer Tom Petersen and Senior Director of Engineering Rev Lebaradian who shared their thoughts about it, and confirmed that Nvidia is not part of it, will not support it, and there are – at least to them – no big benefits from using it.
Of course, most of what Nvidia claimed is PR stuff and nothing more. But let’s take things from the beginning. When MaximumPCMagazine asked about Mantle (16:00 mark), Tom Petersen said AMD is free to develop and innovate in any area they think is important.
“We don’t know much about Mantle, we are not part of Mantle. And clearly if they see value there they should go for it. And if they can convince game developers to go for it, go for it. It’s not an Nvidia thing. The key thing is to develop great technologies that deliver benefits to gamers. Now in the case of Mantle it’s not so clear to me that there is a lot of obvious benefits there.”
Rev Lebaradian said then that ‘if you go look at the numbers, compare our DX drivers today to Mantle games, I don’t think you’re going to notice any big improvement‘ to which Tom added ‘in configurations that matter‘.
But later on, Rev and Tom contradicted themselves. While Tom claimed (and Rev agreed) that there is no benefit from using Mantle, Rev said:
“It’s possible to pull performance out of DirectX, we’re approving that, and so you can argue that maybe it’s not a good idea to put extra effort into yet another API that does the same thing essentially. Feature wise there is nothing more.”
And just a couple of seconds afterwards Rev said:
“DX12 is coming and a lot of the features, the benefits of having a lower level API (the extra calls and stuff), it’s going to be in DX12.”
So, how come Mantle does not have any features and is similar to the other APIs when DX12 will pack the same new features that Mantle already supports? Especially when Nvidia is using DX12 as an excuse for not supporting Mantle?
All in all, it all comes down to specific techs that companies are trying to take advantage of, while at the same time downplaying the features of their enemies. This basically means that Nvidia will never support AMD’s techs/features, and the same applies to AMD as well (which explains why they did not take advantage of G-Sync and went ahead with FreeSync).
I think Gordon Mah Ung, Editor In Chief at Maximum PC Magazine, was spot on when he said:
“G-Sync is a perfect example. You know what? G-Sync is pretty damn cool. But you know what? Only works for Nvidia GPUs. Cool stuff, doesn’t work with AMD, Intel ‘meh’ and of course AMD is like ‘Hey, we’ve got Freesync’ right? Can’t we just all get together?”
To which of course Tom replied “why can’t we be friendnemies? (laughs)” and with Rev adding “I mean would you ask BMW to give their technology to Mercedes?”
And that is that!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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