AMD's Mantle Graphics API Adopted By New Developers

AMD has announced that three new developers have joined to be a partners on Mantle, its recently announced graphics API. Cloud Imperium Games, Eidos-Montréal, a part of the Square Enix Group, and Oxide Games are three new partners that joined already rapidly increasing lineup of developers that wants to be a part of the Mantle API project.

In case you missed it back in September when it was announced during the GPU'13 press conference, AMD's Mantle API is a low-level API that aims to provide PC game developers an experience similar developing on consoles, with direct access to its GPU features and rendering techniques to  reduce OS and CPU overhead, on all GCN-based GPUs (HD 7000 series onwards).

Although PCs have clearly outpaced (last gen) console performance, games on consoles usually get more out of the available hardware due to the more direct access to underlying hardware, while PCs are overwhelmed with a more complex, high-level API, OS and driver stack.

Cloud Imperium Games developer is new on the scene, but with project like Star Citizen, a crowd-funded PC space simulator, and legendary game designer and now CEO, Chris Roberts, it has certainly drew a low of attention. Chris commented, "AMD's Mantle will allow us to extract more performance from an AMD Radeon GPU than any other graphics API. Mantle is vitally important for a game like Star Citizen, which is being designed with the need for massive GPU horsepower. With Mantle, our team can spend more time achieving our perfect artistic vision, and less time worrying about whether or not today's gaming hardware will be ready to deliver it."

Eidos-Montréal is currently working on the next Thief game; a first-person stealth adventure set for release in February 2014. David Anfossi, studio head of Eidos-Montréal noted that "Mantle lets you use AMD Radeon GPUs the way they are meant to be used, unlocking many new opportunities and increased CPU and GPU performance. Because of this, Mantle is one of the most important changes to PC graphics in many years."

Finally, Oxide Games is developing its new "Nitrous" engine for 64-bit, multi-core processors. Dan Baker, co-founder of Oxide Games said that "AMD's Mantle technology lets us get more out of the hardware than any other solution available. Adding Mantle support to our multi-platform, 64-bit Nitrous engine realizes significant gains in performance on Mantle-enabled hardware without adding enormous development overhead."

DICE was already backing the Mantle API on upcoming Battlefield 4, which will be one of the first games to feature it with a post-launch patch slated for release around December.

All four developers will be speaking about Mantle architecture and implementation at the AMD Developer Summit (APU 13) scheduled for November 11th.