And as far as I'm aware, those are the only games confirmed to even use it. It's clearly not working for everyone.
Assassin's Creed IV may use it as well, as NVidia has quite a large lead in that game. It's hard to tell though as the engine is internally capped at 62 FPS. At any rate, we'll never see wide support of this tech as long as AMD does not implement it in their drivers, which they still haven't done..
That combined with the fact that even NVidia took their time when it came to supporting command lists, a lot of the buzz surrounding DX11 multithreading has died down.
What would make it buzz worthy again is if some major games this year supported it. So far we have Project CARS, which is a major game. Hopefully Watch Dogs and Witcher 3 might support it as well, as they are both NVidia sponsored titles.
I simply don't see DX11 multithreaded rendering as the solution, since almost no one uses it, and a studio like Dice says it's not working for their uses.
As it currently is, you're right, it's not the solution. But it could be I think if it were improved.
I could easily see DX12 having an improved
MANDATORY version of deferred context rendering via an improved driver model and a more multithreaded API.
When studios are prepared to spend time and money on supporting a whole new API (Mantle in this case, also proprietary) something clearly isn't right. And in the case of Dice, Johan Andersson has said he has pitched this idea to all vendors before, and he hopes it will make Microsoft improve DirectX.
Well Mantle definitely has a lot of attention right now, so I'm sure Microsoft is finally being pressured into fully confronting the performance issues of Direct3D.
But if it currently could be solved by AMD/Nvidia improving their DirectX or OpenGL drivers, then that's what the studios would demand. Mantle isn't free for either AMD or the game studios.
Mantle could never be a full replacement for Direct3D. It has no backward compatibility and limited architectural support which automatically makes it dead on arrival.
You may say that DirectX can linger around for backward compatibility, and Mantle for everything else, but that just needlessly adds more burden to developers to have to support and maintain two rendering paths.
Mantle and Direct3D cannot co-exist forever, due to limited resources. Eventually, one will eat the other.