AMD clarifies: Mantle is not AMD’s CUDA, Microsoft was well aware of its existence


AMD Gaming Evolved

Another day, another Mantle article. A couple of days ago, French website Hardware interviewed AMD’s Raja Koduri who shared some interesting information about the red team’s upcoming API. According to Raja, Microsoft was well aware of the existence of Mantle. Not only that, but AMD will continue working with Microsoft on all the latest versions of DirectX, just like they’ve been doing this whole time.

As Raja Koduri told Hardware:

“I can’t obviously comment on Microsoft, but the thing I can say is we have a great relationship with Microsoft. We are one of the best partners they have in terms of moving DirectX forward. We move DirectX forward, we work with Microsoft on every version of DirectX and we will continue to do that and obviously we wouldn’t surprise them with anything like Mantle so you can read between the lines. 

Koduri also claimed that Mantle is actually driven more by the game developers than them, meaning that ‘the game developers are ready for major kind of tests, working on new engines, new stuff and they really want to take the PC as a first class citizen.‘ 

Now this begs this simple question – if Mantle is actually driven more by the game developers, why does it require a graphics card built with the GCN architecture? Shall we read between the lines again or not?

When asked about its openness, Koduri refused to give a straightforward answer and simply claimed that Mantle is an industry standard.

Last but not least, Koduri claimed that more triple-A developers are working on Mantle – that may be revealed at AMD’s event next month – and that Mantle is not AMD’s answer to Nvidia’s CUDA.

“I think you may see more around developer summit. Mantle for us is a very developer driven effort, when they are ready they’ll say it. Johan was ready he said it. It is not like we came up with Mantle then we kind of want to push it, it is not AMD’s CUDA.”

Kudos to NeoGAF’s member ‘artist’ for spotting the interview!