In fairness it seems like the users on this forum rarely get the same numbers as review sites, so it seems like none of them can be trusted. We should probably just stop posting graphs from websites
Another good point. Microsoft's API will work for these people and may also improve gaming for people with laptops/desktops running Intel graphics. Hopefully DX 12 will too, although I believe it still remains to be seen what OS is needed for DX12. These users may not bother with a new OS until they buy a new system.
Microsoft is helping these people to game on their PCs, even if it could be done better. There are probably people today that will play games on these PCs thanks to Microsoft. What Microsoft and DirectX has done for a long time is open up gaming to a large number of users.
There are also a large number of PC users, including AMD users that probably don't ever update their graphics drivers and so won't get Mantle, they'll have DirectX though.
There are also a large number of people with older AMD graphics cards that don't support GCN and DirectX allows them to play games.
Linux will struggle to get these average users I think. I think it'll struggle to get 'super users' too until it has a good backlog of games. How many people here still go back to Skyrim, WoW or some other DirectX game from time-to-time? Would you give this up so you could play the 2 new OpenGL games and Valve's back-catalogue? And then the trouble is, which devs will go to the effort of making a game run on an OS nobody is really using? So how will it ever get a decent back-catalogue? Why does it matter to devs if we use Windows or Linux?
Mantle will only be of benefit to newer AMD graphics card owners and also only those that update their drivers or had Mantle drivers pre-installed. And even then unless it becomes the default graphics option there are normal users that may not use it.
The 'average' user/gamer is likely to owe their gaming experience more to Microsoft than Linux or AMD. If this is Microsoft hating on PC gamers what must these other companies that are doing less for gamers think of PC gamers?
Could Microsoft have released a new major version of DirectX sooner than they have (DX11.2 was fairly recent as I recall)? Yeah, probably. But their are probably lots of companies that don't update things as quickly as they could. I mean it took Microsoft, what, 10 years to update their precious console money cow that is the XBOX 360 to the XBOX ONE. So it looks like they (and Sony) let the console market stagnate as well if that's your definition.
Who has done more for PC gaming than Microsoft?
Could they have done better? Probably, very few things are perfect.
Could they have done worse/less? Yes, they could have done as much as everyone else has.
Anyone playing the latest and for future games will have updated there drivers that have support for the latest games regardless of Mantle.
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