Restoring functionality of AMD’s now depreciated graphics API
WePC is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Prices subject to change. Learn more
If you were playing PC games around the 2013 to 2015 era, you may remember a host of games that were released under AMD’s Mantle banner. This was an API that developers could use, which was intended to give them more access to the hardware in their machine, with less of a performance hit from both Windows itself and the DirectX graphics API. Using this API, developers were able to push AMD graphics cards much harder, and get much better performance out of the same components. It was both an advantage to players who used AMD hardware, and an additional selling point that AMD hoped would sell more cards.
Ultimately this was a fairly short-lived initiative. Perhaps because developers time was better spent attempting to optimize their games for a wider variety of systems, not just those with a specific brand of GPU, or perhaps because publishers, in general, were prioritizing multi-platform development, with not many development resources being dedicated to any kind of PC-specific features. For whatever reason, ultimately AMD ended the initiative, stopped partnering with developers to implement their Mantle API, and depreciated support for it from their newest drivers.
The Mantle project was not a complete waste of time, it did eventually form the basis for the Vulkan API, which is now a far more widely used industry-standard graphics API, with extensive support across modern devices and game engines.
Games that previously used the Mantle API are now no longer able to on the latest AMD drivers. These games still work, but you’ll have to use one of the other options for a graphics API, typically DirectX 10 or 11, but these aren’t able to match Mantle for performance, so it’s been a shame that there’s been no way to run them in Mantle mode on the latest drivers. At least until now.
A new Open Source project, dubbed “GRVK”, is a layer that can sit between a game and the Vulkan graphics API, to essentially run the game on the Mantle API, even though it’s no longer officially supported. This lets you these old games with the Mantle performance improvements, but on a modern system with the latest drivers, and it is compatible with all modern GPUs, not just AMD ones. It’s a little technical, but if you want to learn more you dive into the projects Github page. It’s currently at a very early stage, and is not yet ready to run full games, instead just in the testing phase, rendering a basic graphic as a starting point, but once this is fully developed, the hope is that it’s going to restore what might have otherwise been a forgot relic from five years ago.
Mantle had a decent run, with several big games that you may want to revisit at some point having used it. Here’s the complete list of releases that used the Mantle API:
We’ll be keeping an eye on this project, as it’s potentially going to be a fantastic way to get improved performance on these games. This is a hobbyist project, and as far as we can tell there is no commercial backing behind it, certainly not from AMD or any of the publishers of Mantle enabled games, so we expect this project to take some time to develop to the point where it is stable and ready for general use, but it is certainly an interesting project for the future.
