AMD’s Mantle has had a bit of a low-key presence this year as compared to 2013 when DICE pushed it as a strong alternative to DirectX 11 (and the future DX 12). This coincided with the release of Battlefield 4 and though things have been quiet since then, AMD has announced three new titles that will support the API.

These include Visceral Games’ Battlefield: Hardline, which focuses on cops vs. robbers; Bioware’s Dragon Age: Inquisition, the next big open world title in the Dragon Age franchise; and Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare on the PC, which is interesting since it released for the Xbox One (that supports DirectX 11 at this point). According to AMD, these three games will “absolutely fly” on Radeon hardware.

While Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare will be out later this month for PC, Battlefield: Hardline and Dragon Age: Inquisition will be out in October for PS4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, Xbox One and PC. Thoughts on all three supporting Mantle? Let us know in the comments.

Since Microsoft first revealed DirectX 12, set to release in Holidays 2015 for Xbox One PC, its graphics the API has faced some sort of scrutiny. Would it be able to speed up the Xbox One’s CPU significantly or simply allow for more efficient hardware speeds.

Confetti CEO and co-founder Wolfgang Engel gave his thoughts on the same. The name may sound unfamiliar but Engel worked as the lead graphics programmer for Rockstar’s RAGE group, implementing graphics for titles like Grand Theft Auto 4, Read Dead Redemption, Midnight Club Los Angeles and many more. Engel has since gone on to form Confetti, a middleware company that specializes in developing solutions for global illumination, Sky dome and Post FX system, and has consulted and worked on several other big name releases besides aiding studios in better understanding and implementing graphical techniques.

Regarding DirectX 12, Engel said to GamingBolt, “I like it. It’s great and it’s a fantastic opportunity to raise the bar again. It works with the same piece of hardware, so it’s the same CPU and the same GPU, and certainly we have much more CPU time to spend.

“The workload on the CPU decreases substantially, because you can utilize better the cores of the CPU. In this way you are less likely to be CPU limited. One of the cool features of modern games is that we have physics, and they have been traditionally implemented on the CPU and as a game developer you have to go back and ask ‘do I have to spend 40% of my CPU time’ on rendering or ‘can I reduce this so that I can use it for physics’ and this is one of the things that DirectX 12 allows you. This makes sure that the developers can get more out of the existing hardware.”

“AMD’s Mantle is also going in the same direction and has the same structural idea, reducing CPU time so that it can be free up for other tasks. One CPU usage case is multiple GPU set ups which is kind of an interesting development because when you have multiple GPUs, say two GPUs, you would not expect to be actually CPU limited. But now the CPU has to feed two GPUs which are really fast, suddenly your CPU becomes the bottleneck. DirectX 12 and Mantle are resolving that situation.”

There are plenty of similarities between DX 12 and Mantle but what about their respective advantages? “The advantage of Mantle is that it’s able to squeeze out of a few more cycles from the AMD platforms. The advantage of DX12 is that it runs on all GPUs,” says Engel.

We know that DX 12 will have a fairly strong impact on PC games when it launches late next year but will it have the same technical impact on the Xbox One? Interestingly, Engel revealed that, “The Xbox One already has an API which is similar to DirectX 12. So Microsoft implemented a driver that is similar to DirectX 12 already on the Xbox One. That freed up a lot of CPU time.”

What are your thoughts on the same? Let us know in the comments.

This is just a snippet of our interview with Confetti and we will have more in the coming days.

Much has been made about the benefits of Microsoft’s recently revealed DirectX 12 API. While some proclaim its capability of increasing performance for the Xbox One, others have doubted whether it can actually do much more than increase the efficiency of the hardware.

Persistant Studios CEO Camille Mirey, responsible for the particle effects middleware PopcornFX, provided his view on one of the benefits of DirectX 12 – that is, the reduction of CPU overhead since PopcornFX particle effects rely on the CPU. With DirectX 12 being such a low level API, will this provide benefits to the middleware?

“We aren’t really affected by this, as we usually make very few driver calls, but we are looking forward to Microsoft’s DirectX 12.”

Camille further clarified that while there is a reduction in CPU overhead, it doesn’t make a very big difference to PopcornFX when calls are made to DX12. “This is a reduction in CPU overhead when calling the graphics driver. We intensively use the CPU, but make very few calls to the graphics driver. Therefore, while this improvement is great when you have lots of drawcalls, in our case, it will be like removing a droplet from a bathtub.”

Speaking about AMD’s own API Mantle, which can increase the number of drawcalls – which the middleware seems dependent on – what kind of benefits would this provide for particle effects? Camille responded that, “Some features of Mantle seem interesting for us, it allows lower level control similar to what we have on consoles.

“About drawcalls specifically, there seems to be a misunderstanding here – our middleware is not hungry for draw calls. This is one of the advantages of our batching system. We typically only have a few drawcalls even with thousands of different emitters.”

What are your thoughts on the matter? Let us know in the comments below.

Incandescent Imaging’s Dylan Browne went from obscurity to underdog indie developer within a matter of days after launching the Indiegogo for Caffeine, a first person horror title developed on Unreal Engine 4. Given that Browne is primarily developing for the PC, Gaming Bolt thought to ask him his thoughts on the API and how it would change the landscape of games on PC and Xbox One.

Browne stated that, “I think that it will be good, but I doubt it will make a massive change, that being said more performance is better!”

This comes off of quite a bit of skepticism regarding the API. Some developers feel that it will entail an increase in performance for games, particularly on the Xbox One, while others believe otherwise.

Browne also discussed his thoughts on AMD’s own graphics API Mantle and whether it would have the reach – in terms of support for game development – as DirectX. He answered, “As a slight AMD fan myself I would like for Mantle to be adopted and I think that it will perhaps not have the same reach as DX12 will but it seems at the moment that quite a few developers are adopting it and it does provide some very nice performance boosts.”

What are your thoughts on the same? Let us know in the comments and head here to support Browne’s Caffeine on Indiegogo.

This is just a snippet of our interview with Graphine Software and we will have the complete interview this Friday.

DICE has put its future projects and DLC on hold to properly fix Battlefield 4 but each new update only seems to bring more problems. Such is the case with the company’s introduction of AMD Mantle support.

Some users have been reporting crashes with Battlefield 4 whenever they head to the Options menu. One Reddit user proposed a solution, which was to go into the Device Manager and disable MOBO Internal Graphics. This should fix the problem though you might need to modify it a bit if you’re running the game on two monitors.

Battlefield 4 is currently available on PS4, Xbox One and PC. It has been experiencing problems pretty much since the day it launched – so much so, that class action lawsuits have been lodged against EA and DICE for the same. Regardless, what are your thoughts on the experience thus far? Have you been experiencing as many issues? Let us know below.

At the Nvidia G-Sync launch event, John Carmack spoke about AMD’s low level API, Mantle. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’d know that Mantle is an application programming interface that will reduce CPU overhead by calling up to 9 times more draw cells when compared to other APIs like Direct3D and OpenGL. On top of that, Mantle will also allow direct access to the GPU and give developers more control over the hardware.

However Carmack does not believe that Sony and Microsoft will be using the API for their respective next gen systems.

“If Microsoft and Sony both embraced it that would be very, very powerful for AMD but it doesn’t look like they are going to, at least Microsoft from the words that they’re mouthing. I mean if I was still doing all of the major technology coding for next-gen game stuff I probably would not be embracing Mantle right now but there would be days when it would be extremely tempting, but I would dispassionately step back and look at it… I probably wouldn’t come down on the side saying it’s worth the effort there. Obviously others have come to different conclusions,” Carmack said at the event [transcribed by EuroGamer]

Given that both consoles have x86 architecture with an AMD CPU and GPU, patching them to support Mantle might not be a difficult task. But is it going to be worth the effort? This is a question that is yet to be answered. Many next generation PC games like Thief and Star Citizen will be utilizing AMD Mantle API for programming, and Battlefield 4 will be receiving a patch next month for it. So the support for this new API is definitely rising. Whether Sony and Microsoft should look into adding support, if they want to keep the consoles abreast of the latest optimization methods, remains to be seen.

Do you think that down the line Sony and Microsoft should support AMD Mantle? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.