Mantle melded with PowerVR in real-time Vulkan demo
The wraps came off of Vulkan, the next-generation rebuild of OpenGL, at the Game Developers Conference last week. Although the graphics API is still in development, we learned quite a bit about it in a conference session devoted to the topic. That session started with a fundamental truth: Vulkan is based on AMD's Mantle API, only it's been adapted and extended to work properly with a range of different modern GPU architectures.
This adaptation work is particularly crucial for makers of mobile GPUs, since many mobile graphics cores simply work differently than big desktop chips like AMD's GCN-based Radeons. The folks at Imagination Technologies ship tons of PowerVR graphics cores in Apple's iOS devices, among other things, and Imagination's GPUs are tile-based deferred renderers, not immediate-mode renderers like most desktop GPUs. Tilers can be more efficient ...