AMD's been keeping relatively quiet about its Mantle API for a while now, leaving us wondering how impressive it could actually be. Turns out, quite a lot actually. At least that's the impression I got from this Oxide Games space demo which is able to smoothly render thousands of ships at once.
The raw numbers are impressive alone even without the demo. There's 3,000+ ships, including some giant capital aircraft carriers, thousands of active missiles and bullets flying all over the place, formation flying, beautiful lighting and the frame rate? 200+ constantly.
This is before any GPU optimisation too. It's thought that with improvements in that area Oxide games would be able to get as many as 100,000 separate objects on screen at once, while rendering at over 300 frames per second.
To put that into context, current Direct3D rendering starts to max out at around 15,000 objects.
Ultimately the new API that could replace DirectX on AMD hardware platforms, reduces the API overhead by as much as ten times and scales much better with multi-core CPUs theoretically giving big boosts to multithreaded titles.
The most exciting thing for AMD CPU users though, is that Mantle has the potential to make affordable chips like the 8350 perform as well as, if not better than Intel's new Haswell 4770k.
We'll have to reserve judgement until we get some more independently verified demos, but this is very promising.
Does it make any of you want to switch out your Nvidia GPU for an AMD one?
Skip to 26:20 for the start of the game demo.