GRVK 0.4 Released For Running AMD's Mantle API Over Vulkan

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GRVK 0.4 Released For Running AMD's Mantle API Over Vulkan

While AMD's Mantle graphics API development has been suspended for more than a half-decade already with the Vulkan API successfully taking off, the open-source GRVK project continues to let Mantle unofficially live on by re-implementing its interfaces over Vulkan...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GRVK-0.4-Released

[theriddick]

I do believe Dragon Age Inquisition had Mantle API support? or was that just 16bit floats? I can't remember now.

[StandaSK]

I do believe Dragon Age Inquisition had Mantle API support? or was that just 16bit floats? I can't remember now.

Yes, it seems Dragon Age: Inquisition is one of the few games that supported Mantle. Not sure how well it worked though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catego...rt_Mantle_(API)

[Adarion]

I thought Mantle and Vulkan are very similar. But I only know from hearsay. And yes, I only remember one or two games maybe supporting it, then Vulkan specs were released and everyone went Vulkan.

[Turbine]

I thought Mantle and Vulkan are very similar. But I only know from hearsay. And yes, I only remember one or two games maybe supporting it, then Vulkan specs were released and everyone went Vulkan.

You're correct. It's somewhat based off of Mantle. They offered it to the Khronos Group. It was more of a working proof of concept.

[microcode]

Crashing NVIDIA drivers was my life, when I was writing graphics applications lol.

[dragon321]

I thought Mantle and Vulkan are very similar. But I only know from hearsay. And yes, I only remember one or two games maybe supporting it, then Vulkan specs were released and everyone went Vulkan.

Vulkan is indeed similar to Mantle, mostly because Mantle was donated to Khronos Group by AMD. Some Vulkan API functions are the same as they were on Mantle, only prefix changed from "gr" to "vk". On the other hand Vulkan is not identical to Mantle - there are some differences like render passes. This is probably caused by the fact that Vulkan was also designed to work on mobile GPUs while Mantle was limited to desktop GPUs.

[FireBurn]

Civilization V supported Mantle for sure

[libcg_]

Vulkan is a more generalized and refined version of Mantle, like a 2.0 version.

The main difference lies in how descriptor sets are handled, GRVK currently implements it accurately but it's extremely slow and uses too much memory, it will need rework. The shader format is also different, AMDIL vs SPIR-V, but it proved to be less of a pain point than I envisioned because AMDIL is quite similar to DXBC.

[sarmad]

What's the purpose behind this? Sounds like a waste of time.