Radeon R9 290X Priced at $729.99 on Newegg.com

[BiggieShady]

Well, ideally you'd hope that the Mantle initiative gives MS some cause for thought on overhauling DirectX, but knowing how agile MS are, I wouldn't hold my breath.

It was good for them that lowly xbox had some kind of advantage ... and now, potentially, the very cheapest steambox with AMD APU will be able to run all games done with mantle enabled engines, as good as xbone.

A lot will depend on how committed (cash) AMD are to making it work. Activision would seem to a natural bandwagon jumper so I could see them adopting it- but I can't really see much benefit in easing workload on an engine that produced stratospheric framerates in any case.

Not so much Activision, they traditionally don't make games that need massive number of draw calls each frame ... DICE on the other hand, with their huge visibility distance, already hit 7k draw calls in bf3 while developing frostbite 2. CryEngine is often used for games with huge draw distances, so CryTek could profit from implementing mantle renderer.

Ideally the API needs to raise the game i.q. levels substantially over DX/OGL to make the software anything other than a bullet point...if it doesn't then it becomes just another feature like TressFX or PhysX,

The thing is, with increased max number of draw calls each frame, you should get much more dynamic (interactive) objects on screen, so it's about scene/game complexity, not directly image quality.

and of course if it does then we end up full circle from the advent of the gaming GPU, because dollars to donuts the other two vendors will follow suit....the good old, bad old days of Glide, Matrox Simple Interface, RRedline, SGL etc...

Of course, unless history repeats itself ... and we all know that never happened before

 

[btarunr]

AMD. You kinda suck.

Time to work on other projects for me. Console + GTA V, here I come. Heh heh.

Et tu. :shadedshu