So if you all haven't heard of this yet, you will soon...

I'll start the ball rolling here:

Mantle Demo and Keynote presentation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIWyf8Hyjbg

How Mantle Works
http://techreport.com/review/25683/delving-deeper-into-amd-mantle-api

I know the benefits of such an implementation, but I still don't like it...

We had such similar things mid 90's and it had a reason why everything went to OpenGL/Direct3D.

Problem, MS didn't do much to minimize the overhead within Direct3D, that's what upsets game developers and I can totally understand why they "cry" for a lower API like Mantle.

The thing that get me is that in pretty much EVERY article so far they mention how it is like GLiDE... ;)

Amazing to think that the legacy of 3Dfx is still being felt today! 8-)

I guess most people don't remember Glide was simply a harshly abbreviated version of OpenGL that simply made it easier to implement and add 3dfx-specific extensions on the fly. Being much more compact, if offered a good performance advantage as well.

As soon as NVidia released their first Alpha OpenGL "game drivers", GLquake and the likes could immediately be played on a Riva128 card as well, using their OpenGL components as fully complatible Glide substitute.

The Kronos group was notoriously slow (if at all) implementing new rendering techniques and back in those days, alot of 3dfx "quick&dirty" routines and Drivers naturally didn't meet the very high OpenGL standards to even enter the slow certification & validation procedures.
Took them many years to realize games were valid OpenGL applications too, and leave their AutoCAD mindset behind.

IMHO Mantle may bring a general speedup in the rendering API that has the potential to improve speed across all supported devices.

If they manage to yield a sufficient advantage over OpenGL/DirectX and make it cross-platform... They might find enough momentum to establish it.

Unfortunately, as witnessed more and more often, rendering speed or quality doesn't make better games by itself :P
To me it seems almost all big publishers (even previously good and reliable ones) are migrating to the "cash cow" syndrome or simply abandon their game once enough cash is made...

UbiSoft's FarCry3 comes readily to mind, one of the more interesting yet buggiest titles ever released with a literally catastrophic multiplayer stability. Unpatched since almost a year now and v1.05 Multiplayer still plays like a v0.92alpha (internal testing only).

Whatever AMD does with it, it better had much more qualified and solid support than their Catalyst Drivers sometimes had in the past.

Those are great news in my oppinion!

An API that can extract the maximum of the card, like Glide did in the past. Let's see what AMD can do.

I have the doubt if Mantle is really related with Glide, or it is only similar but it have nothing related to it.

The second one - it is a similar idea, but not related to GLiDE. ;)

The post is a little old but I thought I'd throw this out there now that there are a couple of games that have implemented this.

After installing the 14.3 beta drivers from AMD and patching Thief 4 to the latest, my average frame rates jumped from 34.2 to 54.4 and the high went from 54.6 to a 78.2 using the in game bench mark that's in the menu screen of Thief. Although I wasn't having any issues with the game freezing or jittery, it was a pretty steady 34 average, it is SO much more noticeable on how smooth it is with this enabled. 

I'm using a 2 gig Sapphire 7870 OC edition which isn't top end but it's not low end either and it had a sizable jump in frame rates. I was rather impressed.

This is the only game I have that has implemented it, I don't have a lot of new games, but I wanted to throw in the results that I got from it.

The slower your CPU, the higher the benefit :) What is the rest of your system config?

I do have an older system, it's about 4 yrs old now but I can generally run pretty much every at Ultra still for the most part. I've running a Phenom II x6 1090T 3.2 with 8 gigs of DDR III, 64 gig Crucial SSD for OS and 2x 1TB in a striped raid on a GIGABYTE GA-890FXA-UD5 890FX board and a ASUS VG248QE Black 24" 144Hz 1ms gaming monitor that I just bought.

I haven't tried mantle yet, cause:

A: my 6950 card isn't supported yet, and

B: I don't play any of the games that currently support Mantle :)