Tuesday, October 15th 2013
Xbox One Doesn't Support AMD Mantle API
As proponents of the DirectX API, which single-handedly shaped consumer 3D graphics market for the past decade and a half, it shouldn't come as a shocker, that Microsoft's next-generation entertainment platform, the Xbox One, will not support AMD's ambitious Mantle project, a 3D API that's tailor-made for the company's Graphics CoreNext GPU micro-architecture, on which the GPU driving the Xbox One is based. The company released a statement to that effect mentioning that "other APIs" such as OpenGL and AMD Mantle won't be supported on Xbox One. Says Microsoft;
Source:
Microsoft
We are very excited that with the launch of Xbox One, we can now bring the latest generation of Direct3D 11 to console. The Xbox One graphics API is "Direct3D 11.x" and the Xbox One hardware provides a superset of Direct3D 11.2 functionality. Other graphics APIs such as OpenGL and AMD's Mantle are not available on Xbox One.The Xbox One will support DirectX 11.2, an evolution over DirectX 11, which adds support for a new feature called "Tiled resources," which lets 3D apps more efficiently manage available hardware resources, by streaming portions of single large textures as a 3D scene being rendered demands it. It heralds a kind of virtual memory system for the GPU, and Microsoft could encourage game developers to take advantage of it, for their Xbox One titles. Such a feature already exists with OpenGL.
11 Comments on Xbox One Doesn't Support AMD Mantle API
MANTLE, OPENGL AND DIRECT X API is also not supported on PS4 because they have their own API to talk to APU.
Microsoft is just being obvious here. :wtf:
AMD implied that Mantle could be used to develop game across three platforms (PS4, Xbone, PC), but now the truth comes out. Mantle will be used for only one platform, PC. And it will be a very, very small niche of users on that platform.
I think we can safely stick a fork in Mantle. Glide 2.0 is officially done. It's for the best.
I know Microsoft is forcing DX11.2 on the Xbone because they want to push their API, but it would have been nice if they would allow OpenGL as well. Honestly, I think it would have led to a much better experience of gamers if all 3 major platforms(PS4, Xbone, and PC) all had a common API that game developers could use. It certainly would lead to less crappy ports.
However, I think now that Xbox will be the only console not use OpenGL that means developers will likely start developing games in OpenGL first and release native versions for PC and PS4, and then port the game over to Xbone. So I'm guessing most of the Xbone titles will end up being ports.
Nobody is gonna ask the programmers what platform they like to develop for.