AMD Mantle API Documentation [closed]

Question

Is documentation for AMD Mantle available somewhere ? I can't find anything on http://developer.amd.com/

Comparision of OpenGL,DirectX and Mantle would be nice, if Mantle is at the same level ob abstraction.

Shively

There's no public information on the Mantle API so far. Only selected developers have access to it. – Division

What can be stated with certainty in comparison to OpenGL: no Linux support as of yet. ;) – Parity

For the time being, the best you are going to get officially from AMD is here. Regarding abstraction, no - Mantle is lower-level than OpenGL or Direct3D, which is the entire point. AMD claims that D3D and GL are too burdened by historical GPU architecture and API design to expose modern GPU functionality efficiently. Short of a few examples citing the overhead of batching draw calls, they have not explained exactly what this means to the public yet, however. It has been said that D3D and GL can be layered on top of Mantle. – Katanga

There is anecdotal evidence from third-parties that Mantle works together with HLSL-based shaders. It would be interesting to see if this implies a dependency on D3D and that HLSL shaders + Mantle only works on Windows, or if compiled HLSL bytecode could be natively translated by an eventual Linux implementation of Mantle. That could be a tremendous boon for the Wine project. If Mantle implements its own HLSL compiler, that will undo some of the benefits of HLSL in the first place (namely the fact that Microsoft has been the sole implementer of the compiler). – Katanga

@AndonM.Coleman: It likely just means that the shader syntax is HLSL based (which makes sense; a whole new language would be a huge burden for technical artists and require new shader-authoring tools), just like Cg is an entirely independent shading language that is more or less drop-in-compatible with HLSL. They could also have chosen GLSL as a base, but an HLSL base makes more sense for the AAA games space (the target of Mantle) since it's the shading language for WinPC games, XBox, and PlayStation (via its use of Cg). Mantle likely does not use HLSL bytecode from fxc (I would guess). – Inflection

So, Mantle is below DirectX and OpenGL. It looks like Gefore PTX or HSA, am I correct ? – Shively

Answer 1

According to the GDC presentation the Mantle Beta SDK developer website will opening in April. But there will be only selected access. You have to contact AMD if want to have access to it. You have also to sign a secrecy agreement. Because of this I think there will be no public documentation available.

By the way the prementioned presentation shows some code snippets, which gives you some hints how the API looks like. It seems that Mantle is more like Direct3D 12 offering pipeline state objects, command list, discriptor heaps and tables.

Things like bindless textures resources also already avaible in OpenGL.

This presentation shows some code snippets of using Mantle - like this one:

GR_APPLICATION_INFO appINfo = {};
appInfo.pAppName = "myApp";
appInfo.pEngineName = "myEngine";
appInfo.apiVersion = GR_API_VERSION;

GR_UINT32 gpuCount;
GR_PYSICAL_GPU gups[GR_MAX_PHYSICAL_GPUS];

GR_RESULT result = grInitAndEnumerateGpus(&appInfo, nullptr, &gpuCount, &gpus[0]);

if(result == GR_SUCCESS)
{
    FindSutableGPu(gpus, gpuCount);
}

You can register for the Mantle beta program here: http://developer.amd.com/mantle/

Bugeye

Answer 2

The documentation for Mantle is available from the AMD web site.

From the site: "Mantle API Programming Guide Copy: This 450-page programming guide and API reference provides developers with a detailed look at the capabilities and architecture of the Mantle graphics API.​"

Here's the link: OLD DEAD LINK http://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations/software-technologies/technologies-gaming/mantle#downloads OLD DEAD LINK

Updated Link: https://www.amd.com/Documents/Mantle-Programming-Guide-and-API-Reference.pdf

That said, the library itself is not available publicly. The core concepts (and much of the structure of the API itself) have been folded into the designs of both DirectX 12, and Vulkan.

Mantle lives on however and is still under development. The current focus is adding first class support for upcoming VR solutions based on AMD hardware. Mantle is still currently only available to AMD partners under NDA.

There are a couple projects that are focusing on reverse engineering Mantle and providing usable wrappers. In particular, lwjgl (http://lwjgl.org ) is working on wrapping Mantle for use in Java programs.

Your best bet currently (July, 2015) is to download the Windows 10 Technical Preview release along with the Microsoft Visual Studio development tools. This will give you the ability to write DirectX 12 applications today even thought DirectX 12 isn't "released" yet.

Smashandgrab

Updated Link is dead too now – Kofu

Answer 3

The Documentation has been published by AMD:

https://www.amd.com/Documents/Mantle-Programming-Guide-and-API-Reference.pdf

Here is a complete reference/instruction to the API.

Selfmastery