How can so many still not get this?
- Heavily multithreaded rendering
- Asynchronous compute
- That's where the complexity is (meaning with DX)
- This now translates easily to the PC (meaning with Mantle)
It's almost a direct copy - you're talking about AMD x86 CPU and AMD GCN GPU in the console and in the (AMD) PC. How much different can it be? WHY would it be so different?
The reason it's so hard under DX is because DX can't deal with multithreading properly and doesn't know what to do with compute either so it just mashes it all together in a single thread, causing the game to stall. Mantle - and the consoles - has separate queues so compute can run simultaneously with graphics, with no chance of either stalling the other.
Devs will start to take advantage of this feature in consoles very soon, and it will transfer to Mantle very easily. It will probably need cutting out of the DX version, or will be cut due to time/difficulty.