Interview with AMD's Matt Skynner about Mantle and new Radeon cards

[Boomstick777]

At last week's GPU14 Tech Days Hardware.Info interviewed Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager of AMD's graphics business unit. He's responsible for all AMD GPUs. We discussed the new Mantle API and the newly announced graphics cards.

Hardware.Info: “Still, you have to be able to give a ballpark estimate. Are we talking about a single or double digit percentage increase, or even more?”

Skynner: “I'll put it this way. We're not going to develop an entirely new API just for a performance gain of 3 or 4 percent. It will be a significant increase

For PC games the new consoles is good news. Since many games are developed for consoles first, the fact that the new consoles are based on x86 processors and powerful GPUs means that games will be better optimized for PCs. Especially things like multiple monitors, 4K screens, tricks to improve the picture quality and so on, will benefit PC gaming.”

http://us.hardware.info/reviews/485...att-skynner-about-mantle-and-new-radeon-cards

 

[Rroff]

Think people are badly mis-understanding where the performance aspect is coming from with Mantle - its not an out the gate performance accelerator and thats not why AMD would have put time and effort into it. Its main (though not only role) is about lifting the technical limitations that restrict performance when doing certain things.

 

[Lokken86]

Think people are badly mis-understanding where the performance aspect is coming from with Mantle - its not an out the gate performance accelerator and thats not why AMD would have put time and effort into it. Its main (though not only role) is about lifting the technical limitations that restrict performance when doing certain things.

Roff,

Can you please explain in a little more detail about the current limitations and how mantle can help to 'lift' them. Thanks.

 

[LtMatt]

Good find Broomstick.

 

[HighlandeR]

So a 5% percent increase

 

[Tonester0011]

So a 5% percent increase

Significant increase! So at least 6%!!

 

[Sampsy]

Significant increase! So at least 6%!!

Don't get too excited. It is probably 4.1%

 

[Rroff]

Roff,

Can you please explain in a little more detail about the current limitations and how mantle can help to 'lift' them. Thanks.

It will take quite an essay to cover it properly.

One aspect is that higher level APIs have become further and further removed from the low level systems and the low level systems are essentially blind to what the high level API is actually doing and so can't adapt themselves to get the best performance so they go with a preset that gets the best performance out of a more complicated function but has the side effect of less complicated functions having a higher performance overhead. By giving programmers back that ability to interface with the hardware more directly they can fine tune things like that based on what they know about the way their engine works to get the best performance out of the kind of workload they are throwing at it.

Gonna have to come back to this post when I've got more time to explain it better.