AMD’s Mantle API Adopted by Crytek

AMD (NYSE: AMD) this week announced that Crytek and AMD have entered into a technology partnership that will add native Mantle graphics API support to CRYENGINE®. CRYENGINE is the latest iteration of the industry-leading game engine that has powered Crytek gaming titles since 2004.

AMD’s Mantle API makes creating games for the PC more efficient than ever. Launched in September 2013, Mantle works by streamlining communication between a gamer’s CPU and GPU. By alleviating communication bottlenecks and making efficient use of existing PC hardware, Mantle helps improve overall game performance.
“AMD is delighted to bring Mantle support to the enormous audience of gamers and game developers reached by Crytek’s CRYENGINE,” said Ritche Corpus, director of ISV gaming and alliances, AMD. “Together, AMD and Crytek are forging a path for the graphics industry that better utilizes gamers’ advanced AMD GPUs through ‘closer-to-the-metal’ API design.”

he potent combination of Mantle and CRYENGINE empowers game developers to accelerate PC development and extract unprecedented gaming performance, exclusively from AMD products with Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture.

“Crytek prides itself on enabling CRYENGINE with the latest and most impressive rendering capabilities,” said Cevat Yerli, Founder, CEO & President of Crytek. “By integrating AMD’s new Mantle API, CRYENGINE will gain a dimension of ‘lower level’ hardware access that enables extraordinary efficiency, performance and hardware control.”

The inclusion of AMD’s Mantle API will now allow CRYENGINE licensees to ready their development studios for a future increasingly focused on the ‘closer-to-the-metal’ vision that AMD has pioneered.

What Mantle does 

 

Just as when two people communicate through a translator, this works, but it isn’t efficient. And it’s the CPU that has to do all this extra work, translating and queuing data for the graphics card to process. PCs are meant to be the ultimate gaming platform — they have the power — but all this translation slows things down, and game developers approached AMD asking for something better.

What Mantle does

Mantle is the harmony of three essential ingredients:

1. A driver within the AMD Catalyst™ software suite that lets applications speak directly to the Graphics Core Next architecture;
2. A GPU or APU enabled with the Graphics Core Next architecture;
3. An application or game written to take advantage of Mantle.

Mantle reduces the CPU’s workload by giving developers a way to talk to the GPU directly with much less translation. With less work for the CPU to do, programmers can squeeze much more performance from a system, delivering the greatest benefits in gaming systems where the CPU can be the bottleneck.

What it means for gamers

Now that Mantle has freed up some extra CPU capacity, we expect Mantle will lead to better games, and more of them, since Mantle makes game development easier.
That’s not all Mantle will do for gamers. By shifting work to the GPU, a mid-range or older CPU isn’t the same handicap it was before. With Mantle, the GPU becomes the critical part of the system, and GPU upgrades will have a bigger impact than before.

• “Crytek prides itself on enabling CRYENGINE with the latest and most impressive rendering capabilities. By integrating AMD’s new Mantle API, CRYENGINE will gain a dimension of ‘lower level’ hardware access that enables extraordinary efficiency, performance and hardware control.” – Cevat Yerli, Founder, CEO & President of Crytek.
• "AMD's Mantle will allow us to extract more performance from an AMD Radeon GPU than any other graphics API," Chris Roberts, CEO, Cloud Imperium Games.
• "Mantle lets you use AMD Radeon GPUs the way they are meant to be used, unlocking many new opportunities and increased CPU and GPU performance. Because of this, Mantle is one of the most important changes to PC graphics in many years." David Anfossi, studio head, Eidos-Montréal.
• "AMD's Mantle technology lets us get more out of the hardware than any other solution available. Adding Mantle support to our multi-platform, 64-bit Nitrous engine realizes significant gains in performance on Mantle-enabled hardware without adding enormous development overhead." said Dan Baker, co-founder, Oxide Games.

CRYENGINE® by Crytek The potent combination of Mantle and CRYENGINE will empower game developers to accelerate PC development and extract unprecedented gaming performance. Find out more