Last week AMD held a powwow of tech journalists from around the world to unveil their upcoming graphics cards. Called the GPU14 Tech Day, it effectively laid out AMD’s graphics strategy for the remainder of this year and into 2014. While new products were shown and detailed, there was one element which no one was expecting: Mantle, an API which aims to upend the PC graphics industry.

In order to understand where Mantle is coming from, we need to go back in time and take the Playstation 3 as an example of how AMD wants to change the way games interact with a PC’s graphics subsystem. While the PS3’s Cell processor and its associated graphics core are extremely hard to program for, games like Uncharted 3 and The Last of Us boast visuals that are equal to if not better than some of today’s newest PC games which run on hardware that was unimaginable when Sony launched their console.