This is a problem that has plagued engine and driver design since at least the DX9 era, and a large body of real-time rendering tradecraft is motivated by it (instancing, state sorting, texture atlasing, texture arrays, uber-shaders, to name a few). On the PC, with current APIs, this notion is firmly rooted in fact. The conventional wisdom in real-time rendering is that batches, or draw calls are expensive. It provides essentially the same feature set as DX11 or OpenGL, and does so at considerably lower runtime cost. Simply put, Mantle is the most advanced and powerful graphics API in existence. In order to understand why its worth it, you need to understand just how important Mantle is. Mantle has required an up-front investment, but the cost for future products to continue offering it will be considerably lower.īecause Mantle is so new, and so different, the development cost is higher than normal. It is also important to understand that, with the right architecture, graphics APIs are essentially a fixed cost. If the abstraction layer is well built, then the cost of maintaining two graphics platforms is not worse than the cost of one.
#Hd civilization beyond earth background code
Every cross-platform graphics engine that we have ever worked with has been designed around some kind of API abstraction which separates the game code on top from the graphics platform on the bottom. In software, the only numbers of significance are 0, 1, and N. After all, why would anyone write their application twice, when they could write it once? Why then, would we spend a great deal of time and effort in something that would benefit only a subset of our user base? The idea of a platform-specific API, while not unheard of was not often implemented. Mantle is a new graphics API developed by AMD, and supported on all newer AMD devices beginning with the Radeon HD 7000 series.Īs game developers, we want to maximize our products reach while minimizing our development costs. DirectX is dominant on Windows, and OpenGL is dominant on many other platforms. At present, the two most well-known graphics APIs are DirectX and OpenGL. The API provides an abstract set of commands like draw which are translated by a GPU driver into commands which a particular device can understand. Civilization graphic engineers Josh Barczak and John Kloetzli introduce AMDs Mantle API, and explain why Firaxis is supporting Mantle with Civilization: Beyond Earth.Ī Graphics API (Application Programming Interface) is a protocol that rendering engines use to send commands to a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit).
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