According to an official blog post over at AMD, it appears that AMD is giving up on its Mantle API as it has served its purpose of being a bridge between two DirectX versions and while the future of Mantle is still not clear, it is obvious that AMD will focus on DirectX 12 in future.

In a blog post written by AMD's VP of Visual and Perceptual Computing, Raja Koduri, Mantle has pretty much reached its end and although it will remain available to partners who register in co-development and evaluation program, AMD suggest that developers interested in Mantle 1.0 functionality should focus on DirectX 12 or GLnext.

While Koduri noted that AMD will no longer release Mantle 1.0 as a public SDK, which was originally expected, the company did release a 450-page programming guide which should help with future APIs.

As noted, the future of Mantle is still not clear as Koduri also noted that "Mantle must take on new capabilities and evolve beyond mastery of the draw call. It will continue to serve AMD as a graphics innovation platform available to select partners with custom needs," which suggest that it might evolve to something different.

While Mantle may have reached its end of life as important API it did push Microsoft in the right direction with DirectX 12 showing that it is quite important that low-level API is quite important and paved the way for better multi-GPU usage.



Source: AMD.com.