Mantle (API)

Mantle was a low-overhead rendering API targeted at 3D video games. AMD originally developed Mantle in cooperation with DICE, starting in 2013. Mantle was designed as an alternative to Direct3D and OpenGL, primarily for use on personal computers. In 2015, Mantle's public development was suspended and in 2019 completely discontinued, as DirectX 12 and the Mantle-derived Vulkan rose in popularity. The draw call improvements of Mantle help alleviate cases where the CPU is the bottleneck. The design goals of Mantle are to allow games and applications to utilize the CPUs and GPUs more efficiently, eliminate CPU bottlenecks by reducing API validation overhead and allowing more effective scaling on multiple CPU cores, provide faster draw routines, and allow greater control over the graphics pipeline by eliminating certain aspects of hardware abstraction inherent to both current prevailing graphics APIs OpenGL and Direct3D. With a basic implementation, Mantle was designed to improve performance in scenarios where the CPU is the limiting factor: Mantle was also designed to improve situations where high resolutions and "maximum detail" settings are used, although to a somewhat lesser degree, as these settings tax GPU resources in a way that is more difficult to improve at the API level. While Mantle provides some built-in features to improve GPU-bound performance, gains in these cases are largely dependent on how well Mantle features and optimizations are being utilized by the game engine. Some of those features include: The Mantle API was only available as part of AMD Catalyst prior to 19.5.1, which was available for Microsoft Windows. AMD promised to support their Mantle API only for their graphics cards and APUs which are based on their Graphics Core Next microarchitecture, but not older products based on the TeraScale microarchitecture.