Mantle Intel -Marriage or infatuation and a jealous Direct3D -the other woman?

Couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post on AMD's Mantle where I had distilled information from a number of sources. Sometime later from then I wrote another blog post on Mantle talking about nVidia's response to it. From those and other news articles at that time one could conclude that AMD was in for a fight with nemesis Intel, nVidia, and the API competitor Microsoft's DirectX. Now it seems AMD is marrying Intel and Direct3D might be the jealous other woman, or perhaps I am getting a little ahead of myself here.

An interesting set of measured statistics has been published by techradar that compared the performance of Mantle enabled AMD GPU's running on AMD CPU's versus Intel CPU's. Techradar reports an interesting find that Intel and Mantle pairing resulted in better frame rates than AMD and Mantle pairing. We have to be careful when we say this because the pairing advantage seems to be where there is CPU intensive operations by DirectX, Mantle helps the AMD CPU's come closer to Intel CPU's running DirectX.

What does all of this mean then? If you are a gamer, you are better off with an Intel/Mantle combination as is inferred by techradar and I agree. The impression we could get and as touched by techradar is that AMD is not focusing on CPU comparison, instead take out nVidia altogether and then this would cause problems for DirectX. If Mantle and Intel combination succeeds in a hypothetical world with many game developers in support then this is dire straits for DirectX because let's not also forget TrueAudio part of the AMD package. Given that all this is in the early stages and DirectX is coming out in flavor number 12, it actually means a hard time for Mantle rather than the other way around. For me, I am continuing to develop my 3D engine in Direct3D (a component of DirectX) and there is no intention of changing that yet. It does mean that I will most likely try my hand at Mantle and will likely provide that support time permitting because I like Mantle and I like Intel.

So is Direct3D the jealous other woman? If Mantle keeps on growing strong then I guess she is, except we haven't seen her 12th incarnation yet. There is also the case of whether Mantle supports every technology of Direct3D and that I cannot answer. What I can say is that none of the reviewers of games running on Mantle have yet talked about any missing graphical functions compared to DirectX so at least those features are present that are needed to maintain the quality of the original version written for DirectX. In all of this we have forgotten about nVidia so is this a sign of things to come? I have another dilemma now, I really like nVidia too! so now what do I do? There is only one thing to do, watch the market, see how things are turning out, adjust and adapt. The beauty of it is, whatever goes, it is replaced with something even better so there is really no loss to think about.