John Carmack, the industry veteran and the legendary creator of Doom, took to twitter to voice his opinion about the newly introduced Mantle API by AMD.
Mantle allows developers the platform to extract a high level of utilization from the existing GCN architecture as well as the GCN 2.0 architecture found in the new Radeon series, via low-level-high-performance drivers.
Carmack stated that AMD has an interesting opportunity with Mantle for them considering their GPUs are powering the next-gen consoles but remains doubtful if the console manufacturers themselves will be helpful about it.
He also states that if Valve’s Steambox goes the AMD route then it can also benefit from a lot of AAA content and if it came to that, Microsoft and Sony may get downright hostile to it.
Below you can read the tweets and the replies he got:
AMD has an interesting opportunity with Mantle because of their dual console wins, but I doubt Sony and MS will be very helpful.
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) September 26, 2013
@Blassster I didn't even think about that — yes, that would help the steam box a lot with AAA content.
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) September 26, 2013
Considering the boost Mantle could give to a steambox, MS and Sony may wind up being downright hostile to it.
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) September 26, 2013
@romainguy I don't know the details, but it is pitched as a console level hardware access for the PC from AMD.
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) September 26, 2013
@johncapra A good graphics API won't have many process transitions, so OS efficiency won't matter much. It should be mostly memory writes.
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) September 26, 2013
On August 7th 2013, Carmack joined the Oculus VR team as their Chief Technology Officer (CTO). His sudden move gave many a scare that he left id software for good and that his creations and projects including but not limited to: Doom 4 and Rage 2, might not see the light of day.
A separate news by id software reassured fans by confirming that John Carmack will still be contributing to id software in conjunction with his new position at Oculus VR.
Check out the whole conversation on Twitter.
