i swear this is not about AMD or Mantle, stop deflecting, can't you have a discusiion about a topic without trying to make it an argument red VS green ?
You mentioned mantle yourself in the post he quoted
Dear me this will just spiral out of control as usual, AlamoX give us some proof to back up these made up percentages/dates instead of just talking guff.
what post are you talking about ? i dont recall bringing Mantle up at all
Let me help you out then:
you see thats the probleme with you, i am talking about how microsoft could prevent all of us from benefiting from DX12, even if i get windows 9, and it has DX12, it will not be adopted by devs because the user base would be fragmented between 7,8, and 9, the DRM rumored about windows 9 will make it even harder to finish the migration toward 9, making windows 7 stick around even longer, and DX12 user base evolving even slower, resulting of me and you and the rest of us buying windows 9 for DX12, while devs keep developing on DX11, because they dont give a crap about 15-20% user base.
windows 8 being lighter on resources doesnt change the fact that 0 game uses DX11.2, because win 8 have around 6% user base.
but you feel my argument is hiding something about Mantle and AMD, and you just can't help yourself but to deflect to AMD, what can i say suit yourself.
Also how is comparing DirectX and Mantle a Red vs. Green argument? In case you're not sure aware, Red vs. Green is when you're arguing AMD vs. Nvidia. DirectX isn't 'Green'.
Or did you realise all this but decided to start an argument rather than make a point?
I can kind of understand them doing that in this instance though. They both use the same OS, so if you want that particular game you just have to use the particular client. It's not really a big issue for the everyday gamer, just an inconvenience at most. For EA it ensures people have to use their client, thus making it more popular and Origin is now quite well established. I can see them bringing it to Linux/SteamOS if it takes off.
The trouble with Linux currently is that the games that currently run on it are quite limited (do a search in Steam, it's not hard). This would be your back catalogue if you moved to Linux as a gaming platform. Currently no Origin games (that aren't on Steam) work on Linux I believe? Thief doesn't support Linux at the minute.
So you sort of have a Chicken and the Egg situation. Which goes first does Thief/BF4 port to Linux and then add in Mantle when it comes, hoping that the fact they've moved will give AMD a reason to port Mantle? Or does Mantle go first and then hope that once it works on Linux that DICE will go back and port BF4 (it'll still take some effort to port, even with Mantle)?
The other thing is Mantle only currently supports the latest AMD GPUs, so again it doesn't seem like Mantle can be the only API they use to code the game. If you drew a Venn diagram to find all the Linux using AMD 7000 series or later owners I imagine it'd be a pretty small percentage of gamers. People aren't going to want to go to that effort to port a game for that few people. On top of that they'll only get money from those people that don't already own the game, unless they charge for it all over again.
So the point is they need to code the games for another API (as well as Mantle) to cover everyone else. The obvious answer looks to be OpenGL. But OpenGL already exists and works in Linux and support Nvidia, Intel and AMD cards. So if the developers wanted to they could already port their games to Linux and take advantage of all the gamers on Linux (not just the AMD 7000 series and later gamers on Linux). I'm not entirely sure why having to move the game to Mantle as well as OpenGL is going to make them more keen to do so?
And to try to bring it back to sorta being on topic...
I see this a bit like Nvidia with Mantle. For a lot of users it'd be easier if we just had Steam and didn't also have to use Origin, UPlay and the like. But these companies see something in having their own digital distribution platform. UPlay is a little different but Valve and EA have made their games exclusive to their platform, in spite of the fact they may get more games sales if they were available on both (I know friends that refuse to buy BF3 because it required Origin, but they bought BFBC2 on Stream). I suspect they both fear that letting their games be sold on their competitors platform will strengthen their competitors foothold.
I suspect this is where Nvidia (and possibly Intel) are coming from if they don't support Mantle, they don't want to strengthen AMD's position. You can call it pride, but they're businesses, not helping out your competition seems like a fundamental principle.
Now Nvidia don't have their own version (that we know of) but that doesn't mean they want to strengthen AMD's position. That's where DirectX comes in. Microsoft is not a competitor to Nvidia and Intel (arguably it is to AMD with the whole Mantle vs. Direct3D thing) so it makes sense to support them.
Direct3D 12 is hopefully gonna be the game changer. Games have to be written with the industry standard API in mind, which is not Mantle and without Nvidia support is unlikely to ever be Mantle. So at the minute games have to work with DirectX 11, they can also work with Mantle but it is still bound by the limits of Direct3D 11. Hopefully Direct3D 12 can come along and take over from Direct3D 11 quickly meaning that games can be written to make use of what Direct3D 12 can do. I'm sure most of this can be done by Mantle too, or Mantle2 or whatever, but I can't see these things really changing until DirectX 12 is released. So from that point of view Direct3D 12 will hopefully be one of the biggest changes to PC gaming in a while.
