Futuremark has launched a new API Overhead feature test for its 3DMark benchmarking utility, with the test allowing users to test performance differences between DirectX 12, DirectX 11 and Mantle API.

Windows 10 Technical Preview users on build 10041 and the latest video drivers from Windows Update will now be able to access the test through 3DMark Advanced or Professional Edition. To test the DirectX 12 features, users must have DirectX 11-compliant hardware with at least 4GB RAM and 1GB video memory. To run Mantle tests, you need AMD hardware that works with the Mantle API.

Developed in collaboration with AMD(NASDAQ:AMD), Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA), the test’s objective is to determine the “relative performance of different APIs on a single system.” Essentially, you’ll be able to gauge how your current system performs with DirectX 11, and the differences in performance when using DirectX 12.

The API Overhead test works by sending a call to the GPU to draw an object on the screen, which is handled through the API. The more efficient the API, the more number of lines that can be drawn on the screen. The number of draw calls is increased with every iteration, with the final result calculated based on the maximum number of draw calls per second achieved by an API before the frame rate goes under 30 fps.

With DirectX 12 slated for commercial availability later this year, Futuremark’s test offers users a way to check how their current configurations will be able to handle Microsoft’s new API.

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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 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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Today’s announcement regarding Mantle is probably the biggest announcement AMD has made around Mantle since they talked about it at GDC in March. Back then, AMD was talking a lot about Mantle’s capabilities and games with Mantle, but they didn’t talk about the expansion of the program much, even though that was probably their most captive audience. In fact, making today’s announcement about the closed beta should probably have been done at GDC as that would have been their target audience and they could have even spoken directly with most of the interested developers. Alas, it was probably not ready yet for a beta release and they waited until today to make the announcement. Either way, you can now head over to an actual beta page for Mantle and access the NDA SDK if you are given access by AMD. In all honesty, Mantle has technically already been a closed-beta program for quite some time and this announcement doesn’t really seem to change much other than create a public page.

You still have to email mantleaccess [at] amd [dot] com in order to even get access to the page and/or SDK and you have to supply them with the following info:

• Name of company
• Name and email of contact point for Mantle access
• Game title(s) or codenames for which you are interested to evaluate Mantle for
• Reasons for requesting Mantle access

Once you’ve emailed them at that email address with that info you MIGHT get access to Mantle and you COULD start developing with Mantle, but there simply aren’t any guarantees since AMD is still selecting who they do and don’t want using Mantle. AMD claims that they’ve already got 40 different developers using Mantle  with this new beta program and are looking to expand it further, even though we don’t exactly know how many developers AMD can really support simultaneously and still do it well. I want Mantle to be successful and to be broadly accepted, but in the end it is still a proprietary graphics API which means it will only work on AMD’s GCN cores and nobody else’s and I’m not sure how many developers are going to want to develop games for both Mantle and DirectX 12.

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There’s a new Civilization game that was just announced with a new game trailer and some limited screen shots. This new game is called Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth and it is basically the Civilization game franchise going beyond this planet and becoming SciFi. This game will focus on other worlds and universes and alien planets and will likely put humans against their environment and each other. Firaxis hasn’t said much about the game itself, but they did provide a pretty interesting trailer as well as some somewhat boring looking screenshots. Hopefully the game will look more interesting than the screenshots they provided when this game comes out this fall. Oh, also, this game will support AMD’s Mantle API which means that there’s a good chance that a lot of users with AMD’s APUs will see a pretty significant performance improvement playing this game versus Civ 5.

The screen shots, below, are also posted on their site for your inspection, as well.

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