Advanced Micro Devices, AMD, is preparing to live-stream its 30 Years of Graphics and Gaming commemoration.
The event will be streamed on AMD's Investor Relations page and hosted by AMD's Chief Gaming Scientist, Richard Huddy, on Aug. 23.
With Microsoft's DirectX 12 picking up more steam lately, AMD's commemoration takes some time to talk up the hardware manufacturer's rival Mantle application programming interface (API) to investors and fans of the Red Team. Dave Nalasco, AMD's technical manager, attempted to explain the differences between DirectX and AMD's Mantle in a recent interview.
"In general, Mantle is all about trying to give tools to developers who want to extract more performance out of a game at any given situation, whereas DirectX is primarily about getting a broad set of compatibility so you can run your code once for DirectX and have it run on all of the different PC hardware that is out there," stated Nalasco.
Mantle, according to Nalasco, separates itself from other APIs by giving developers and applications a more direct route to hardware. It gives developers access to some feature that may have been unavailable in the past, said Nalasco.
"So, this allows you to extract more performance out of the hardware, it allows you to implement new techniques that were never really possible before, and really, you know, allows developers to do a lot of the things that they've always asked us to do but haven't been able to do in the past," stated Nalasco.
At AMD's 30 Years of Graphics and Gaming event, there's a good chance the company will look ahead to the future of GPUs and CPUs. Huddy, in a recent interview, talked about the evolution of the approaches developers have been taking optimize software for multicore processors.
"I'd love for us to build a single-core CPU," said Huddy. "Truth is, if you built a single-core CPU, that just took all of the power of the CPU and scaled up in the right kind of way, then no programmer would find it difficult to program, but we have to deal with the real world."
In the real world, according to Huddy, hardware manufacturers have to find the sweet spot among multiple cores and per-core-power.
The 30 Years of Graphics and Gaming commemoration takes place at 10 a.m. EDT on Aug. 23. The live-stream link is on the Investors Relations page. The commemoration will also be live-streamed on Twitch and a replay of the event will be available approximately four hours after its conclusion -- the event's replay will remain online for a year.
