| No, Mantle is for lower end CPUs. It's all about reducing the CPU bottleneck to feeding a graphics card effectively. Which, incidentally, is the reason why the initiative came from AMD (also the strong emphasis on multithreading, since AMD sells cheap 8 core CPUs). If you can all of a sudden game on a weak CPU, then Intel chips will look less attractive in comparison. Where you're seeing small improvement with higher end cards is that they're pumping the resolution, AA etc, with the same number of draw calls. If you instead ramp the draw calls up - for example by putting a ton more objects in your scene - you'll be able to get much more out of high end cards. Mantle isn't going to help at all in the move to 4k, but it really will allow for much more complex games on the PC, akin to when Total War was released. I'd also not take the launch titles as a good indication of what the hardware of these consoles is capable of. They're usually rushed, ported from other platforms, etc. The hardware is capable of much more. This is a good demo that goes into lots of detail: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIWyf8Hyjbg |