Unknown-One
[H]F Junkie
- Joined
- Mar 5, 2005
- Messages
- 8,909
Unless AMD have been total idiots, you're wrong. If Mantle is THAT architecture-dependent, then Mantle would be liable to break when AMD releases a new series of cards using a newer architecture. AMD would effectively be hamstringing themselves by requiring they build backwards-compatibility for Mantle into all future GPU designs.the ONLY way this could work on NV hardware is if NV made a GCN based cards which is about as likely as MS making windows open source
It's more likely that AMD has simply written their own abstraction layer, which will allow Mantle to continue to work no matter what changes they make to the hardware in the future. Such a layer would be semi-portable to other architectures (including Nvidia's).
And like I said, there's also the option of writing a wrapper that translates calls to GNC hardware into the functional equivalents available on Nvidia cards. This is how GLIDE wrappers allow GLIDE rendering engines to run on modern cards (they translate the special GLIDE calls into equivalent OpenGL ones).
Edit: Lets go ahead and take a look at one of AMD's own slides:
Well, there you have it, the API layer has a driver sitting between it and the GPU core (even on AMD's own GCN-based architecture).
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