Not necessarily dead. DICE are supporting it, which means the biggest PC game of the year in the form of BF4, and future sure hits such as Command and Conquer, Star Wars Battlefront, Mirrors Edge 2 can all use it. Also bare in mind DICE are EA's go to developer to make cool tech, e.g. Frostbite 2 which is now the foundation of many of EAs games. It's not an ilogical step to assume DICE have integrated Mantle nicely into the workflow of Frostbite engine. It may not be hard at all for other EA based developers to support it.
I don't know why you'd want Mantle and TrueAudio to be unsuccessful, other than the prove you are right. It'd be a shame if either of these, particularly Mantle, flopped.
Besides, just because it doesn't support Mantle officially does not mean the Xbox One low level API and Mantle arn't incredibley similar, which considering they are both made by AMD and both for GCN architectures, is pretty likely.
At the end, now you're just copy and pasting basically what I'm saying. Yes they are similar, but the kernel has to allow it, which it won't. That's like saying, I have a DX10 GPU in a Windows XP machine. Sure it could work easily, but Microsoft has to allow the support, of which obviously they didn't. It's still an API in the end.
Bringing me to, just because EA/Dice are using it for BF4 (which is not the game of the year, and cannot be in any way) in
Frostbite 3, doesn't mean its other titles will use this tech. Take note, they are patching it in post launch, and I believe this is only in part because BF4 is an AMD gaming evolved title. If it wasn't, I don't believe they would give a rats ass considering the newer consoles won't be utilizing the tech. Not only that, but EA/Dice are just one out of many. It takes the many to make a proprietary (I'll cover that later) tech to catch on.
Which leads me to, why do I want them to flop? Because I hate brand specific ****, because proprietary tech like the DX API have held us back quite a bit. It forces us to take directions that normally we might not want. For instance, DX10 and the move to Vista. Want DX10? Move to the ****ty OS. Don't want it? Don't play Crysis in DX10 graphics. Want to leave XP for the better Windows 7? Gotta ditch that 300 dollar sound card and EAX 5.0 that was the **** back in 06. My bad brah.
Mantle and Trueaudio are not proprietary, such as that as Cuda/PhysX, BUT Nvidia will never incorporate GCN (which Mantle requires), or AMD's DSP onto their cards. What does that mean? Guys like myself (even though I'm on the fence about the 290x) won't have the tech. Or other Nvidia consumers, just like how AMD doesn't get PhysX. If they did, I have a feeling it would run ****ty either way for reasons we can all fathom to ourselves.
I would rather more open source tech widely available for all that use any hardware take off, such as OpenGL, or a physics API like Havok to become standard. Simply because I'm sick and tired of being tied down on such an open platform. I have a PC, not a console.
Edit: I'll also add this. I know that Mantle was developed specifically for PC and high/low level API to hardware management for smoother access to resources. Thing is, it's one extra step to the port process, and AMD is claiming it'll be easier to port to PC from console. But PC is lead development platform for most all AAA studios. That being said, why would they want to make things more difficult on themselves by implementing extra **** when the move to x86 hardware just made things a whole lot easier? If I was a developer, I would not jump on this short lived bandwagon.
? ) . I'm basically upgrading purely for GTAV on PC, knowing that most games after that will be less demanding anyway - though i'm hyped for Titanfall on PC though that doesn't look all that demanding. If they give it the graphical goodies they gave Max Payne 3, and then pair that with it being open world with epic draw distances, it's going to munch major amounts of VRAM.