Star Citizen will be utilizing AMD Mantle. Can you give us an example explaining the benefits of Mantle which otherwise would have been made possible?asked by Ravi Sinha
TL;DRChris Roberts says Mantle gives direct hardware access, letting far more draw calls reach the GPU and use more CPU threads than DirectX, which bottlenecks and adds overhead.
The thing with Mantle is that it lets you go straight to the hardware so you can have actually more draw cores. One of the big bottlenecks in PC game performance is how many draw cores you can actually get through the GPUs. Normally if you profile a modern based PC game, its CPU drops a little bit. Now you can have a whole bunch of Titans in it and they're not really doing much because they can't get all the information from the computer from the CPU side down to the GPU because it's getting bottle-necked in Direct X.
DirectX is really a multi-threaded API so at most I think it deals with two threads, whereas something like Mantle can basically exist on 8 threads…So that's sort of the best thing about it, something like Mantle, is that it does a little multi-processing and it's a much better architecture to work with multi-processors and then it allows you to sort of bypass the OS along with the middle bloatware of something like DirectX.