I then talked with Ritche Corpus, AMD's Software Alliances and Developer Relations Director. Corpus told me that AMD shared its work on Mantle with Microsoft "from day one" and that parts of Direct3D 12 are "very similar" to AMD's API. I asked if D3D12's development had begun before Mantle's. Corpus' answer: "Not that we know." Corpus explained that, when AMD was developing Mantle, it received no feedback from game developers that would suggest AMD was wasting its time because a similar project was underway at Microsoft. I recalled that, at AMD's APU13 event in November 2013, EA DICE's Johan Andersson expressed a desire to use Mantle "everywhere and on everything." Those are perhaps not the words I would have used if I had known D3D12 was right around the corner.

The day after the D3D12 keynote, I got on the phone with Tony Tamasi, Nvidia's Senior VP of Content and Technology. Tamasi painted a rather different picture than Corpus. He told me D3D12 had been in in the works for "more than three years" (longer than Mantle) and that "everyone" had been involved in its development. As he pointed out, people from AMD, Nvidia, Intel, and even Qualcomm stood on stage at the D3D12 reveal keynote. Those four companies' logos are also featured prominently on the current landing page for the official DirectX blog: