AMD to Developers: Focus Your Efforts on DirectX 12, Not Mantle

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

Goodbye Mantle, we hardly knew ye

In a blog post on Monday, AMD's Raja Koduri waxed nostalgic on Mantle and how it "revolutionized the industry's thinking on low-overhead/high-throughput graphics," among other things. But at the end of what reads like a reluctant death sentence, AMD told developers that if they're interested in Mantle 1.0's functionality, they should focus their attention on DirectX 12 or GLnext.
AMD never outright declares that Mantle is dead, and it even vowed to support its partners that have committed to Mantle in future projects, such as Battlefield Hardline. Likewise, AMD talked about a need for Mantle to take on new capabilities, to "evolve beyond mastery of the draw call," and that it will continue to serve the company as a graphics innovation platform available to select partners with custom needs.
So technically, Mantle isn't dead, it's just largely been rendered expendable with DirectX 12 in the wings. Rather than fight it, AMD is encouraging developers to move one, save for those with very specific needs. Or at least that's how we're reading the blog post.
Koduri also said that AMD no longer plans to release Mantle as a public SDK. Instead, the company is making available Mantle's 450-page programming guide and API reference, which developers will be able to download sometime later this month.
It's a very odd announcement, as Koduri tells developers interested in Mantle to focus on DX12 instead, and then ends things by saying, "Join AMD this week at Game Developer Conference 2015 to see not just the future of Mantle, but the future of PC graphics as well."
We'll have more details later this week as they emerge.
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