AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) announced earlier this week at the Game Developer Conference that its Mantle API would be discontinued and suggested developers focus on Direct X 12 or OpenGL instead.

“Proud moments also call for reflection, and today we are especially thoughtful about Mantle’s future,” AMD’s vice president of visual and perceptual computing, Raja Koduri, said in a statement. “In the approaching era of DirectX 12 and the Next-Generation OpenGL Initiative, AMD is helping to develop two incredibly powerful APIs that leverage many capabilities of the award-winning Graphics Core Next (GCN) Architecture.”

AMD said that the Mantle 1.0 API will not be released to the public, however it will be releasing a 450-page API reference and guide on Mantle to interested parties.

But AMD also said that this would not be the end of Mantle per se.

“Mantle must take on new capabilities and evolve beyond mastery of the draw call. It will continue to serve AMD as a graphics innovation platform available to select partners with custom needs,” Koduri wrote in his post.

One direction the underlying technology behind Mantle could go is to be the foundation of future APIs. That’s already the case with the Khronos Group, as it recently announced that Mantle will serve as the underlying foundation of its OpenGL-based API Vulkan.

While AMD faced an uphill battle with getting its API as it lacked the support of Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) or Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), it did get a number of software publishers to commit to support it for upcoming titles. That should be counted as a success.

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Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) upcoming DirectX 12 has a ton of exciting features and optimizations that we already know about. However the most interesting new feature comes via a report from Tom’s Hardware: the ability to pool resources from multiple GPUs from different manufacturers.

The ability to work with two different GPU architectures in the same system comes from DirectX 12’s support of something called Explicit Asynchronous Multi-GPU capabilities and Split Frame Rendering (SFR). Effectively this pools all GPU resources into a bucket and allows them to be utilized as one.

SFR allows developers to manually divide data between the two GPUs to allow them to work together on each frame with the work for each frame divided between the two cards. The older method, called Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR). AFR is considered to be less efficient because it required both GPUs to have all of the data already in their frame buffers. Each GPU would render an alternate frame. The downside of this, however, is that the cards would work in parallel and not independently. If you had two cards with 4GB of memory each, you’d only have 4GB of useable space in the frame buffer in total.

The kicker is that Tom’s source said that SFR will be supported across multiple GPU architectures in the same system. It will treat both GPUs as one. Reportedly this would allow a system with an AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) APU and an Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) GPU to have the two GPUs work together. The same would go for a discrete AMD and Nvidia GPU in the same system.

In the end this will be up to developers to make use of and optimize their code accordingly. AMD’s Mantle already supports a form of SFR, so in a way the precedent is already there.

More details on DirectX 12 — and a confirmation of this report — will likely be available during March’s Game Developer Conference in San Francisco.

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Microsoft has appeared to have developed a viable competitor to AMD’s Mantle if the benchmarks displayed at Intel’s SIGGRAPH booth in Vancouver are consistent with real-world performance.

According to benchmarks and a demo ran at Intel’s SIGGRAPH booth, DirectX 12 offers a 70% boost in performance over DirectX 11 and offers substantial power savings to0. The demo run was a graphically intense simulation of what appears to be an asteroid belt with 50,000 asteroids rendered on screen. This is similar to AMD’s demo of Star Citizen — where tens of thousands of individual ships are rendered in a big dogfight — that it uses to promote Mantle. The demo was run on a Surface Pro 3, which is powered by a Core i5 chip with an Intel HD4400 GPU.

The benchmark Intel ran had two tests. In the first, the frame rate is constant (locked) allowing the benchmark to push the system as hard as possible to get the highest frames per second score possible. The second test, the frame rate is unlocked which allows the system to try and balance performance and power consumption.

As the image below displays, during the first test DirectX 12 had a nearly 50% power savings over DirectX 11.

In the second test, which tried to balance performance and power consumption, DirectX 11 pushed out 19 FPS while DirectX 12 was able to render 33 FPS.

As Intel explains in a blog post, the power savings come by substantially reducing CPU overhead.

“DirectX 12 is designed for low overhead, multi-threaded rendering. Using the new API we have reduced the CPU power requirement and thus freed up that power for the GPU,” Intel’s Andrew Lauritzen wrote in a blog post.

This is a victory for both Microsoft and Intel. For Microsoft, it shows that there is no threat to the established legacy of DirectX. With data like this developers might have to take a long-hard look at moving to the relatively unused and untested Mantle — especially when DirectX runs (hypothetically) equally as well across all platforms. For Intel, this is a victory because it shows that its SoCs and CPUs have the ability to perform well in gaming scenarios on mobile platforms running Windows.

Perhaps there will be something of an API-war in 2015.

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