I guess I'm confused. How can you take features that were designed to work on consoles, port them to Mantle, and then not be able to implement them on any other API for PC, when the XBox One uses DX 11.x and PS4 uses OGL?
If they work on both of those two separate APIs, then they should be able to be made to work on DX whatever version on PC. Granted, perhaps not as efficiently, but still work.
Now, if there are specific routines or functions enabled only by GCN hardware, great. But there are ways to deal with that with current APIs. Direct X games, and developers that code for them seem to be able to have capability queries figure out if you can run TressFX/MLAA/FXAA/TXAA whatever... just fine. Similarly, with current coding, if I decide I don't want to run or my hardware can't efficiently support one of those features, it doesn't shunt me into a completely unoptimized code path running a separate game build. (well unless you are talking about DX version builds, but that's somewhat different)
I'm still struggling, because the "This enables visuals millions of times way ahead of consoles" and "This is the same capability set and code as the consoles, so faster and cheaper ports!" flags seem to be switched and reswitched depending on what logic or questions get asked. I can't soo how it can be both, but the frantic pace of posting in this thread means that both sets of statements aren't in proximity long enough for most people to try and compare.
Sigh. I should probably just stop trying to force it to make sense and wait for the benchmarks. The sheer volume of information being slung about though makes me wonder what sorts of repercussions this is all likely to have, if only on the fate of civil discussion.