We've got a release candidate driver at the moment, and we'll wrap that up at some point this year. Then we start to look at things like Mantle 2 and the future, and that's a very interesting space.
Mantle 2 - if it takes us about a year to get through a Mantle iteration - then Mantle 2 will come around the same kind of timeframe as DirectX 12. DX 12 brings a lot of the goodness that Mantle brought. We had a lot of conversations with Microsoft about what we were doing with Mantle, and in those conversations, they said, 'OK, if you really can solve this problem of building a better throughput system that runs on Windows, then we'd like to take that to Windows as well and we'll make that the extra software functionality that comes in DX 12.' So that's how DX 12 has come about.
We'll take the leanings from DX 12 and take it to Mantle. I'm sure they can help us do a better job than we've done. We will also take the extra hardware features with DX 12, and there are at least a couple of key features which are coming there.
They are pixel synchronization, which let you do some cool transparency effects and lighting transparent substances which is very, very hard on the current API. There's something called bindless resources which is a major efficiency improvement again in how the GPU is running, making sure it's not stalling waiting for the CPU to tell it about some of the changes that are needed. At that stage we'll have Mantle 2.0 wrapped up which covers the same kind of functionality as full DX 12 and gives all the performance benefits that Mantle currently gives plus anything else we learn.
Then we look to the future because DX 12 is not the end of graphics. Mantle 3, Mantle 4, etcetera give us the opportunity to expose any of the new features that we develop in our hardware. There are some that have speculated that Mantle will die when DX 12 arrives, that we'll just put it down and walk away it. Heck, why would you need it?
Well, the answer is it's perfect for portability. AMD does graphics in a variety of places, and [Senior Vice President and Global Manager, Global Business Units] Lisa Su mentioned that about half our business by the end of next year will be on the traditional PC platform and the rest will be elsewhere. Elsewhere, there will be AMD graphics.
Forza 5Build graphics, learn, repeat
DirectX is a generic APi. It covers Intel hardware, it covers Nvidia hardware and it covers ours. Being generic means that it will never be perfectly optimized for a particular piece of hardware, where with Mantle we think we can do a better job. The difference will dwindle as DX 12 arrives. I'm sure they'll do a very good job of getting the CPU out of the way, but we'll still have at least corner cases where we can deliver better performance, measurably better performance. We think we have a good future with Mantle, and games developers can tell you they don't want us to drop it afterwards.
