The market was very different then.
There were dozens of video card architectures, the video card architectures were very different, almost no one licensed game engines.
These days there is 3 video card architectures, the video card architectures all evolved into highly programmable stream processor, a few engines cover a huge portion of the market.
Additionally, MS keep forcing people for no reason to buy their new OS just to be able to use the new DX.
It's not so much the number of concurrent architectures that's the problem, although that IS itself a problem, a bigger problem is ongoing compatibility, are we to believe AMD are forever locked into the GCN architecture? I highly doubt that, when it comes time for them to switch the underlying architecture, what's going to happen to mantle?
This is a question I've posed right from the start, it actually doesn't have anything to do with Nvidia responding, they're 2 distinct problems but share in common the fact that APIs ALWAYS trade off flexibility for optimisation, it's inherent to the problem of an evolving GPU architecture.
I'd say you're over exaggerating MS's actions, they've broken backwards compatibility once so far, that's the XP/Vista DX9/10 divide, and there was good reason for that, DirectX was re-factored to make use of a much better driver model. I know there's planned further changes, we've yet to see if this is truly necessary or not.
It's not as though something like mantle isn't also going to be vulnerable to this in the long run, it will.
Doubtful - only reason mantle can be alive is the simple fact; first time in history....one apu/gpu rules the consoles.
that's coded on the consoles can be ported much easier with mantle.....that's why it just needs to put into the engines and not per game.
Nvidia has no way to leverage.....this is only possibly because of console wins.....while I was wrong about being the api for all 3.....its the api on PC that will make porting console games faster and easier at least for AMD hardware...
we don't know the numbers yet...we'll have more information soon enough
Well the fact that we're seeing confirmation from the console vendors that mantle isn't supported crushes this theory, it's a nice theory one in which I was tentatively on board with when the mantle news broke because obviously it's a real killer move from ATI, but everything we know about it right says it's a PC only API and even if it was to move to consoles there's no reason to believe it would be better than the native APIs and so any more attractive to developers wanting to develop multi-platform, afterall no developer is going to pick mantle only and just abandon all the Nvidia users, that's bonkers.