AMD hopes to get Mantle bits into OpenGL

AMD Gaming Scientist Richard Huddy told The Tech Report that AMD has done a great deal of work with the Khronos Group on the creation of OpenGL Next, the upcoming major revision of the OpenGL specification that will be a from-the-ground-up rewrite aimed at eliminating overhead and giving developers more control over the hardware. Among other things, AMD hopes to get some of its Mantle technology into OpenGL:

Huddy told us AMD has done a "great deal of work" with the Khronos Group, the stewards of the OpenGL spec, on OpenGL Next. AMD has given the organization unfettered access to Mantle and told them, in so many words, "This is how we do it. If you want to take the same approach, go ahead." Khronos is free to take as many pages as it wants out of the Mantle playbook, and AMD will impose no restrictions, nor will it charge any licensing fees.

While Huddy didn't say how closely OpenGL Next might mirror Mantle, he repeated the contention that Mantle shaped DirectX 12's development. We expressed some doubts about that contention when we addressed it earlier this year, but Huddy was adamant. Development on DirectX 12's new features may have begun before Mantle, he said, but the "real impetus" for DX12's high-throughput layer came from the AMD API.