Huge news PC gamers. While Nvidia has not commented yet on supporting Mantle, it appears that both DirectX and OpenGL will be catching up with AMD’s API. According to some slideshows from this year’s GDC, both DirectX and OpenGL will start offering low-level access in order to reduce draw overhead. This obviously translates to performance gains on older CPUs, something that will definitely excite PC gamers.
Here are some quotes from the DirectX and OpenGL presentations that will take place in GDC 2014:
“In this session we will discuss future improvements in Direct3D that will allow developers an unprecedented level of hardware control and reduced CPU rendering overhead across a broad ecosystem of hardware.”
“For nearly 20 years, DirectX has been the platform used by game developers to create the fastest, most visually impressive games on the planet.
However, you asked us to do more. You asked us to bring you even closer to the metal and to do so on an unparalleled assortment of hardware. You also asked us for better tools so that you can squeeze every last drop of performance out of your PC, tablet, phone and console.”
“Driver overhead has been a frustrating reality for game developers for the entire life of the PC game industry. On desktop systems, driver overhead can decrease frame rate, while on mobile devices driver overhead is more insidious–robbing both battery life and frame rate. In this unprecedented sponsored session, Graham Sellers (AMD), Tim Foley (Intel), Cass Everitt (NVIDIA) and John McDonald (NVIDIA) will present high-level concepts available in today’s OpenGL implementations that radically reduce driver overhead–by up to 10x or more. The techniques presented will apply to all major vendors and are suitable for use across multiple platforms. Additionally, they will demonstrate practical demos of the techniques in action in an extensible, open source comparison framework.”
It is still unknown when the first DirectX and OpenGL games will take advantage of these new techniques. It will be also interesting to see whether Microsoft will pull another DX10 on PC gamers and make DX12 (or the version that will offer low-level access) exclusive to Windows 8.
Still, we are really looking forward to see whether the new versions of DirectX and OpenGL will be able to compete with Mantle.
Kudos to NeoGAF’s member ‘Dictator93’ for spotting them.
Stay tuned for more!
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.”
Contact: Email
I just hope people start using OpenGL more and DirectX less…
That will only happen if game developers will give an option to render the game in OpenGL. As of now DirectX has the monopoly.
No, there is no monopoly with DirectX, Windows is the monopoly, developers can choose what graphics API they want, they all choose to jump onto DirectX so it’s nobodies fault but their own.
idSoftware was the only studio that stayed with OpenGL but Carmack was always open anyway ,that’s why he released the source for his engines.
Just don’t make me install Windows 8 again
“However, you asked us to do more. You asked us to bring you even
closer to the metal and to do so on an unparalleled assortment of
hardware. You also asked us for better tools so that you can squeeze
every last drop of performance out of your PC, tablet, phone and
console.”
Yeah like, the basic stuff xD
The thing that I most want to happen is that the SteamOS change minds of devs. I want more and more support for Linux so I can ditch Windows once and for all.
When more people migrate to Linux it will get more and more bloated, then a subset of elites will look to the next thing that very few people know about and sing its praises, and then more people go there*, and the cycle continues.
I don’t really care what operating system I’m on – just give me the OS that allows me to do MORE. 20,000 games on windows and 200 games on Linux? I’ll take Windows. One billion apps on Apple’s App Store and ‘only’ one million on Google Play? – I’ll take Apple. It’s the difference between living in a city and living on a back road in the country.
Each OS comes with its own set of annoyances. Sure, Windows is less secure (as is any city), but we all know now that NO data is secure – and it never will be – security is an illusion that makes us forget the dangers. There’s a reasonable set of precautions one must take on Windows to protect against malware, but that goes for any system. If you jump onto Linux just to give yourself peace of mind then okay, but it’s not much safer if you don’t know what you’re doing – it’s the same with Windows.
Sorry for the rant! 🙂
I agree with the exception of your app store vs. android argument. Google actually has more apps. Sorry, app store does not have 1 billion apps, lul though.
http://www.phonearena.com/news/Androids-Google-Play-beats-App-Store-with-over-1-million-apps-now-officially-largest_id45680
That’s interesting, but I’m sure there’s a ‘catch’ to that statistic, like some companies owning 3,000 web apps or something similarly misleading. The App Store has it’s share of these, but with hardly any quality control on the Google store it must be rampant.
haha no prob with the rant at all, everyone is entitled to their visions/opinions. 😉
I absolutely agree with what you said about the security, in the end it all came to the user wich is too the factor that came to my disagreement with your first point. You see, the “bloat thing” is normal, there will always be a load of tools to do the same thing on every ambient ever, then again, it comes down to the user to make a proper use of the tools provided. Linux as it is today is already “bloated” so the solution is to let the user known what they are getting by having a lot of distros for you to choose (of course the downside being a ‘clusterf*ucked’ community but still down to the user knowledge I think).
Windows itself is bloated with a lot of things that nobody will ever use, but are “shoved down your throat” because you can’t/won’t use them. Honestly, I just use windows because of games, everything else Linux can do better (and I don’t even mention It’s free!)
I totally agree man! I would switch to Linux if that happens…
its coming in 2 years pc will be declared dominant plaform.
Windows 8? Arent MS working on Windows 9 as we speak?
I hope so, because I really, really don’t like Windows 8.
Same. And for some reason my win8 gets stuck on booting into the OS unless I hard reset it.
I havent tuched the POS Win8 as Win 7 are the best.
MS better do right with Win9 or else they are soon thrown out!
Win8 would be fine except for the stupid start screen, which is easily replaced for free with classic shell. Otherwise its FAASSST.
I like it a lot. Best gaming and general os around atm. 9 will be excellent i’m sure.
Windows 8.2 is coming this year and Windows 9 next year.
Just one last cash grab with that 8.2 version, eh?
Music to my ears.
Why are they doing this now? They should have done this like 3 years ago. As soon as Mantle API became a contender they now have the realization to optimize DirectX. Is competition the only motivation to improve DirectX?
competition is apparently the only reason to improve anything apparently….in every industry >_>
yes, microsoft doesnt care about you. only your money. mantle threatened there cash flow so they had to do something.
+1 and for that we all have to thank AMD 🙂
You think that SONY, with it’s over priced tvs, or BMw with there over priced cars, you think that AMD is making GPUs
for $50 and sell them to us for $400 cards, and MS with it’s over priced os, they all Love to make money. The share holders tell the to make more money or we will remove YOU!
What does Sony have to do with this article? so if thats the case then throw in Nintendo, Intel, IBM, and every other company out there. Some of you people.
While we’re being honest here, AMD doesn’t give a crap about you either, just your money. Mantle wouldn’t have ever come in to existence if they didn’t have to compete with Nvidia, who also only cares about your money. AMD is hardly the “white knight” here.
not that sony cares about games either, they are dying, their finacials are CRAP ps4 is their bailout.
So in an article that doesnt mention Sony, with nobody else mentioning Sony, here comes Dakan45 and brings up Sony. Man you’re OBSESSED!!! Go outside man, take a breath, get some air, go hang out with some actual human beings, a girl maybe, cuz man are you obsessed!
OpenGL is in the same bucket so yeah, not sure why either of them didn’t micro-optimize here. Remember also that DirectX is a family of APIs – Direct3D is the OpenGL equivalent. The rest of DirectX deals with audio processing, controller/keyboard input, and GPGPU compute which OpenGL by itself doesn’t provide.
You’re right… on other operating systems that don’t have DirectX there’s OpenCL or CUDA for CPGPU, and then for the rest there’s OpenAL, SDL and for input quite a few use HID directly. Valve for example is moving towards using SDL2 for access to input and sound on Linux/Mac/SteamOS. Most of those can be used on Windows as well.
But anyway, yeah… what they are talking about here is specifically Direct3D.. the rest of DirectX doesn’t have anything to do with graphics.
Of course competition is the only motivating factor, when you can sit on your a*s and make that money, why would you waste money on R&D?
There was really no need. Last gen consoles were already very slow and even the low end gpus were good enough for games. Also new gpu architectures are easier to target and work with. Definitely good move all around.
Great, so theres no need to upgrade my CPU…if only I had known that before…
it doesn’t matter. Windows and drivers will always get in the way and that is never gonna change.
Things always change…if enough people agree to/want it!
Here’s the way I see the API situation at the moment…
1) DirectX is only a monopoly on Windows PCs and or Xbox… Microsoft systems in other words. On the other hand… since Microsoft is still virtually a monopoly in the PC gaming space that means DirectX is virtually a monopoly in PC Gaming in general considering the marketshare for Linux and Mac is still very small relatively speaking.
2) It (DirectX) still the best in real world performance in the games you can actually purchase and play right now. Very few games support Mantle and on other operating system’s such as Linux and Mac it’s OpenGL all the way.
3) Many if not most AAA games ported to other operating systems that are OpenGL oriented are API wrapped/shim’ed from Direct3D to OpenGL on the fly. This causes some overhead on top of the inherent overhead OpenGL already has. This is one reason why OpenGL has a rep for having lower performance. These are native ports I’m talking about here including Valve, Croteam, Feral and Aspyrs stuff. A select few studios use commercial Wine wrappers which wraps everything else as well.
But it’s simply easier at this point to do that than to totally rewrite an engine’s renderer from scratch.
4) New API revisions are good especially when they provide features such as those promised here. Hell, even just 4.4 already has extensions like bindless textures and list streamlined porting from Direct3D to OpenGL as a feature which should help.
However, games have be patched or written from the ground up. So for example, most of your current OpenGL games wont see any advantage to this. Hell, a vast majority of shipped games on Mac for example (which still has more AAA games than Linux) are still on OpenGL 2.x which is DX9 level. Only one game so far uses OpenGL4 at the moment.. Tomb Raider (2013)… However, it’s missing two things right now.. Tessellation (due to driver bugs) and TressFX (due to AMD not making it available I hear).
Well said!
It’s kinda funny how they say “For nearly 20 years, DirectX has been the platform used by game developers to create the fastest, most visually impressive games on the planet.” Simply put DirectX hasn’t always been the fastest or most feature complete API for all those 20 years. Within the first ten years for example I tended to not use DirectX if I could help it. Card specific APIs such as GLIDE where simply better as well as OpenGL with games such as GLQuake and other id tech powered games. It wasn’t until many revisions and vendors such as 3Dfx falling the wayside that DirectX started to dominate IMO.
Not just your opinion…that really is the truth!!
DIRECTX ONE
lol good ONE
those were the OG dayz
make DirectX open source and you win. or atleast release a new optimized version of it to work with all DX10 and DX11 cards and Win7/8 not exclusive to 8 or 8.1, hell not exclusive at all
OpenGL already has low level access and works as well on Windows 8.1 as it does on Windows XP. DirectX has no place as an API with OpenGL and SDL2 out there, it’s still alive just because of momentum and some devs not knowing any better.
some devs ? you mean 99% of big pc titles ? i don’t care about which is better, i care about which runs better on my system and my windows and it’s not OpenGL
Last I checked this has been avail for a while ,but I don’t recall DX or opengl having any relationship with it?it is a server side tweak .porting this to desktop should be easy but then maybe they need to involve DX and opengl .one thing is sure I love this way,way more then mantle .and you will too!
Will this affect older games and titles or just newer ones that make specific use of better optimization? Given my luck, I would say the latter.
Its pretty simple that the developers need more control and the wait for driver update to enjoy a game needs to stop. This for me is the most important thing that needs to change. Also they respond now that they saw what Mantle can achieve. But before they said that no one needed this. The problem with dx is that it has feature sets and with every update you need a new card that will support it. And some times its not backwards compatible. Mantle supports Win 7, Win 8 and linux support is coming as they said. I would prefer an Nvidia low API and an AMD low level API for PC. That would make more sence than developing for ps4 xbox one directx opengl.
Wonderfull news and expected, thats WHY nvidia dont have said s*it about Mantle!
We all know that the devs WONT never ever start programing for a 3’rd API!
Mantle is crap and are allready obsolete and nvidia and OpenGL and even the dipshits at Microsoft are smiling and think, F’CK you AMD you are true 😉
This is the real deal folks!!
“Mantle is crap and are allready obsolete”
I’d love to know how you discovered such deep and insightful information about Mantle.
What he’s trying to say and saying very badly is that Mantle is bound to fail.
Basically, Mantle is going to die if NVIDIA and Intel don’t get behind it, AMD just don’t have the weight to carry it through themselves unless they throw serious money at it and pay devs off to support it(i.e AMD will send their people into game studios and help them).
No matter how good Mantle is, it won’t last long without serious backing. BF4 and Thief are not good a start with no Mantle out of the box and from what I’ve seen Thief is a really good port anyway.
Understandable. I think Intel is more likely to support Mantle initially rather than Nvidia. But perhaps if AMD can really push Mantle far ahead in terms of performance, Nvidia will be forced to either adopt it or throw its weight behind DirectX/OpenGL with its own extensions. One way or another, it should improve things for end users.
psst
as it turns out shadowfail mp is not 1080p nor 60 fps more like 960x1080p at 45 fps.
pff cosnoles
consoles
Wow, again, your sick kid, your sick
“will offer low level acess ”
seems the same as “down to the metal to me”
Pwnd again?
ps whos sick me or you having nothing else to do than go to every xbox article i litteraly click them to find you there
10/10 sucess rate, i NEVER missed, might as well get some other sites outside n4g so you can troll lthem too.
Seriously get a life and stop trolling.
A genius.
OpenGL is smiling and thinks F’CK you AMD?
Too bad AMD is part of the Khronos Group and also working on OpenGL.
ahhahahah oh crap mantle is dangerous quick lets go level acess as well.
DirectX 12 will be exclusive to Windows 8.1? Microsoft, screw you!
its also in Windows 9 as well.
They did the same with XP and DX 10.
Part of why I hate M$ and prefer Linux.
Not even this will get me onto Windows 8.