AMD Mantle is part of Vulkan

The advancement of DirectX 12 and the replacement for OpenGL – Vulkan – puts AMD Mantle in a difficult position, due to the fact that they offer similar functionality and do not only work with AMD Radeon. This has led AMD to start recommending the approaching interfaces instead of Mantle, while the company vaguely talked about further development and more openness.

The cross-vendor Khronos Group has chosen the best and brightest parts of Mantle to serve as the foundation for “Vulkan,” the exciting next version of the storied OpenGL API.

Now AMD tells in a new blog post about “one of Mantle’s many futures”. In the late summer of 2014, it emerged that AMD gave Khronos Group full access to Mantle for the development of the next OpenGL and according to the graphics giant, its own interface has laid the foundation for what has been known as Vulkan earlier this week, which in other words means that Mantle will live on in the new standard.

This also means that AMD indirectly fulfills several promises with Mantle, which was originally intended as an open standard with support for platforms other than just PC / Windows. Vulkan is intended for games as well as general calculations and will be used for everything from mobile phones to computers, while it is an open standard and receives support for all kinds of operating systems.

Like Mantle and Microsoft’s upcoming DirectX 12, Vulkan is primarily about lowering overhead for drawing calls and better utilization of more CPU cores. It also means a completely new application interface without compatibility with OpenGL, which is why it has been gifted with a new name. On the other hand, there is talk of good compatibility with hardware that currently supports OpenGL ES 3.1 and onwards, ie almost all modern graphics circuits.

Khronos Group expects to release a preliminary specification for Vulkan by the end of the year, which will be followed by a sharp launch shortly thereafter.