Are Valve and AMD about to ruin PC gaming?

[gpuerrilla]

Either way, the PC needs to be more fragmented, Windows is gash, DX should die, the choice to be able to run Android(in the future though it's Linux based isn't it?), any linux distro, SteamOS or Windows and have the games install fine on any platform with a likely opengl/mantle API crossplatform support... that is great for consumers and gamers alike.

This.

 

[Gregster]

Calling the PC fragmented and that it is an issue is a big pointer to how little the Article writer understand about what makes a pc a freaking Personal Computer. Some unification isn't bad but i dont want to end up with 1 API and 1 OS. I want choices based on what i want to do. Creative work have had those options, Servers have had those options, Gaming not so much and that has to change. I think having an alternative to Windows for gaming is very important and something that is Linux based would be awwsome. This is why i think Mantle is a good move for AMD and potentially a very good move for the rest of us as it gives us the options to give on other platforms besides windows once Mantle is released for said platform and it forces to some extend the competition to follow suit which is again a good thing for the end user.


They just had to pay nVidia a license fee on every gpu sold that would support it. There are no details yet as to Mantle being truly open or if its also behind some sort of license wall(i hope not)

It worked out at pennies for each GPU and AMD didn't even phone Nvidia. I can't blame AMD for only allowing GCN to use Mantle and if it is as good as the hype is suggesting, it could well be worth having.

 

[ubersonic]

They just had to pay nVidia a license fee on every gpu sold that would support it. There are no details yet as to Mantle being truly open or if its also behind some sort of license wall(i hope not)

AMD/DICE confirmed it is PhysX style a while ago:

This was confirmed by both DICE’s Johan Andersson and AMD’s Chief Software Raja Koduri. Not only that, but as PCGamesHardware reported, AMD does not consider Mantle an open standard like OpenCL or OpenGL.

Koduri tried to save the day and also claimed that ‘if a competitor were to approach AMD to make their own backend and drivers for Mantle, AMD would not dismiss them right away.’ (thanks Beyond3D).

Sounds familiar? This is precisely the same thing Nvidia said about GPU PhysX. As NeoGAF’s member ‘angular graphics’ noted, Nvidia claimed – back in the days – that it was ’committed to an open PhysX platform that encourages innovation and participation,’ and that company would be ‘open to talking with any GPU vendor about support for their architecture.’

Now replace the word PhysX with Mantle and you got yourself the very same thing happening with AMD.

In short, although AMD claims that any GPU manufacturer will be able to use Mantle, the cards from AMD’s rivals should be based on GCN. This means that Nvidia should abandon its current architecture in favor of this new API, something that – obviously – is not going to happen anytime soon. The fact that Mantle takes advantage of the GCN architecture also proves that we’re basically talking about a Glide API (specific API for a number of cards) and not a DirectX or OpenGL API (universal API supported by all cards).

 

[Final8y]

It worked out at pennies for each GPU and AMD didn't even phone Nvidia. I can't blame AMD for only allowing GCN to use Mantle and if it is as good as the hype is suggesting, it could well be worth having.

How much was it because I have never seen a figure, you have a link right ?

 

[bru]

and if it is as good as the hype is suggesting, it could well be worth having.

This is the thing, so much hype over this and to be honest we wont see anything for another good few months, BF4 aside.

AMD are either sitting there saying " so much hype for mantle this is a good thing, people will be impressed"

or

" OMG so much hype for mantle, we really do need to tweak the crap out of this else the 2% performance increase is gonna get us all lynched."

 

[d_brennen]

I don't believe FishSex would have been cheap to license.

 

[Silent_Scone]

Console gamers don't buy consoles because they are faster or frankly anywhere near PC performance, they buy them because they don't want PC's, I actually don't think Sony would give a flying **** about it, MS will but only because it threatens DX and Win

Exactly. Not everyone wants to be cramped at a desk. Sometimes it's just that simple.

 

[Gregster]

How much was it because I have never seen a figure, you have a link right ?

Of course and glad you asked.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/82264-why-wont-ati-support-cuda-and-physx

In the course of writing my recent article on the current and future state of GP-GPU computing, I spoke to both Nvidia and ATI about what they have on the table now and what’s coming up.

The article covers a lot of ground, but a several things are clear. One, Nvidia’s CUDA environment certainly seems to have been adopted more widely in the academic community and high performance computing (HPC) markets. Two, Nvidia is shipping (with a beta driver) physics acceleration on the GPU today, though of course it’s for a physics middleware (PhysX) they now own. Third, neither Nvidia nor ATI really have a wealth of GPU-accelerated applications for the consumer space coming in the near term, though we’ll see a handful of apps in the video transcoding and image manipulation areas.

PhysX
Many have thought that CUDA is proprietary, and will only ever work on Nvidia’s GPUs. This is not entirely true.

Though it has been submitted to no outside standards body, it is in fact completely free to download the specs and write CUDA apps, and even completely free to write a CUDA driver to allow your company’s hardware (CPU, GPU, whatever) to run apps written in the CUDA environment.

Nvidia “owns” and controls the future of CUDA, so it’s not open in the “open source” definition, but it’s certainly free. Nvidia tells us it would be thrilled for ATI to develop a CUDA driver for their GPUs.

But what about PhysX? Nvidia claims they would be happy for ATI to adopt PhysX support on Radeons. To do so would require ATI to build a CUDA driver, with the benefit that of course other CUDA apps would run on Radeons as well. ATI would also be required to license PhysX in order to hardware accelerate it, of course, but Nvidia maintains that the licensing terms are extremely reasonable—it would work out to less than pennies per GPU shipped.

I spoke with Roy Taylor, Nvidia’s VP of Content Business Development, and he says his phone hasn’t even rung to discuss the issue. “If Richard Huddy wants to call me up, that’s a call I’d love to take,” he said.

So what is AMD/ATI’s take on all this? I spoke with Senior PR manager Rob Keosheyan at AMD, and he had plenty to say about the situation. Open industry standards are extremely important to AMD as a company, and they feel that GP-GPU work should be no different. It’s working hard only on its own StreamSDK and Brook+, but with the Kronos group on OpenCL, where it sees the real future.

If open standards are so important, why partner with Havok for physics work? That technology is far from open; it’s owned by Intel, the other chief competitor of AMD/ATI. Of course, there are no truly open physics middleware solutions on the market with any traction, so that point might be kind of moot.

Keosheyan says, “We chose Havok for a couple of reasons. One, we feel Havok’s technology is superior. Two, they have demonstrated that they’ll be very open and collaborative with us, working together with us to provide great solutions. It really is a case of a company acting very indepently from their parent company. Three, today on PCs physics almost always runs on the CPU, and we need to make sure that’s an optimal solution first.” Nvidia, he says, has not shown that they would be an open and truly collaborative partner when it comes to PhsyX. The same goes for CUDA, for that matter.

Though he admits and agrees that they haven’t called up Nvidia on the phone to talk about supporting PhysX and CUDA, he says there are lots of opportunities for the companies to interact in this industry and Nvidia hasn’t exactly been very welcoming.

To sum up, Keosheyan assures us that he’s very much aware that the GP-GPU market is moving fast, and he thinks that’s great. AMD/ATI is moving fast, too. He knows that gamers want GPU physics and GP-GPU apps, but “we’re devoted to doing it the right way, not just the fast way.”

So it sounds like support for CUDA or PhysX on ATI graphics cards just isn’t going to happen unless Nvidia picks up the phone first and offers an olive branch, or there is an overwhelming demand from ATI’s customers.

Even golden boy Roy Taylor was keen to offer this to AMD/ATI but they didn't seem to care.

 

[Final8y]

Nyou

Of course and glad you asked.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/82264-why-wont-ati-support-cuda-and-physx



Even golden boy Roy Taylor was keen to offer this to AMD/ATI but they didn't seem to care.

Sorry but you don't licence such technology out for less than pennies. Maybe your gullible enough to buy that but I'm not and neither is AMD.

 

[bru]

Nyou

Sorry but you don't licence such technology out for less than pennies. Maybe your gullible enough to buy that but I'm not and neither is AMD.

Oh of course how could anything the green goblin ever says be true, but of course the red baron never lies.

 

[Final8y]

Oh of course how could anything the green goblin ever says be true, but of course the red baron never lies.

And I made such claims where ?.

 

[Catanonia]

Only time will tell, but I for one am glad that PS has gone down thier new architecture.

 

[Gregster]

Nyou

Sorry but you don't licence such technology out for less than pennies. Maybe your gullible enough to buy that but I'm not and neither is AMD.

So Roy can't say anything wrong or false now he is with AMD but when he was with Nvidia, anything he said and taken as truth makes that person gullible. Double standards much? Geeeeez.

And what you read you don't like so you just dismiss it. Nice one.

 

[Final8y]

So Roy can't say anything wrong or false now he is with AMD but when he was with Nvidia, anything he said and taken as truth makes that person gullible. Double standards much? Geeeeez.

Strawman, and I don't take much notice of Roy.
Just because I dont believe what someone says does not automatically mean i believe everything that the other says.
You got to stop thinking in black and white.

 

[Gregster]

Strawman, and I don't take much notice of Roy.

I didn't expect any other response from you.

The original article is pure "writing for hits" but that doesn't stop the fact that we have been here before with proprietary/non proprietary tech/software and the same arguments were had then and will be had in the future but to dismiss an article so easily because you don't like the answer is desperate.

Why ask me for a link if you had no interest?

 

[ubersonic]

So Roy can't say anything wrong or false now he is with AMD but when he was with Nvidia, anything he said and taken as truth makes that person gullible. Double standards much?

You don't understand! when Roy worked for the evil Nvidia empire he was a very bad person and told lies all the time, but now he works for AMD's graphics department (formally known as the evil ATi empire) he has been saved and is now a white knight in shining armour who's words hold more truth than Jesus'

Why ask me for a link if you had no interest?

I think he was trying to call your bluff, he didn't expect you to provide evidence.

 

[Final8y]

I didn't expect any other response from you.

The original article is pure "writing for hits" but that doesn't stop the fact that we have been here before with proprietary/non proprietary tech/software and the same arguments were had then and will be had in the future but to dismiss an article so easily because you don't like the answer is desperate.

Why ask me for a link if you had no interest?

It does not matter what you expect and my point has nothing to do with the general argument and I dismissed it on logic because the economies of scale is just not there to charge less than pennies for it to be worth it.

And it would be a good idea for you not to keep making up reasons and answers for me when you have not got a clue besides a typical reason and response.

I asked for I link because I though you may have something that I had not already read

 

[drunkenmaster]

Glide got off to a good start as it was the first API and gave 3DFX a big boost, however once Ati/Nvidia got their OpenGL implementation sorted that countered it and Glide ended up becoming one of the nails in 3DFX's coffin. API's like OpenGL and Direct3D which were supported on any card just had an edge over a propriety API that only worked on one manufacturer's cards, S3's Metal API and PowerVR's API suffered the same fate.

If you were writing a game would you prefer to write it via an API that worked on every modern card, or would you like to do that and then also rewrite it with an API that only works on HD7xxx and newer AMD cards? it's a lot of extra effort for developers for little reward which is why universal API's became so popular.

YEs but again this was in the days where games were costing thousands rather than millions, it was in the days when the industry was new and no one had a clue if Nvidia, ATi, 3dfx or 3 entirely different new companies would be making cards 3 years later. Nothing happening now is anything like the situation back then. We've had two gaming card attempts in the past decade, Matrox with their card which utterly and totally flopped and Intel's Larrabee(ish). Neither gained even a second of traction. At this stage it's pretty unlikely for anyone to try again.

So supporting a company new to the market no one knows will be around in 2 years is a lot of work. Supporting one of two major gpu makers who has been around forever with zero chance of a new competitor coming in and making the work worthless is very different.

Then we have this API argument where people still seem to believe that engines only support DX. Few do currently, most multiplatform games will be compatible with at least 3 api's, more like 4-5 and sometimes more already(low level api on xbox/360, opengl, dx, and soon, low level api(maybe just Mantle) on the x1/ps4).

It actually makes more sense to drop DX entirely and only support openGL, which is what I'd been suggesting AMD/game devs/linux/steam would push for with the new gen consoles coming out being a good starting point with AMD's hardware being so similar across all platforms giving them a huge amount of sway with game devs. If as is incredibly likely Mantle is exceptionally similar to both console API's, it will actually be incredibly little extra work to add support for Mantle on PC's on top of openGL.

If the industry switched to openGL and ditched DX entirely(remember people have windows now, have dx, it won't disappear you can still play everything up to now), then it would be less work overall to ditch DX support and add Mantle support... most likely.

Fact is what I mostly see Mantle doing is forcing the industry to react, even if that is long term dumping Mantle, remember AMD still support openGL and DX more than fine, if Mantle dies they lose nothing, they can ONLY gain in this situation. The industry could decide to go openGL, or MS could decide DX can be open and used on linux, or MS/openGL actually work much harder and "fix" their API's to have much lower overheads, be faster and make a lower level API not worth the extra work. ultimately something needs to change, if Mantle is the catalyst for the change, great, if it IS the change, great.

 

[LtMatt]

A few weeks after the article greg linked...

We talked to Richard Huddy, Manager of Worldwide Developer Relations, and Godfrey Cheng, Director of Product Marketing. Cheng is mostly known for its unofficial title of AMD’s Gaming Czar.

TG Daily: AMD has been touting "Customer Centric" drum for some years now and there is no other way to view the possibility of PhysX running on AMD card than as a "Customer Centric" feature. Is there a chance we will see such this feature for Radeon cards?

Cheng: We will happily work with and support all middleware tool providers. We announced collaboration with Havok since they are willing to operate as a middleware vendor and enable support for all platforms. If Nvidia wishes to place resources into enabling PhysX on AMD platforms, we would have no argument, provided they don’t artificially disadvantage our platforms in relation to theirs. We have attempted to initiate discussions with Nvidia on this matter, but so far they have been less than forthcoming.

Nvidia stated that the PhysX software stack is layered on top of Nvidia’s proprietary CUDA interface. As you know, proprietary interfaces for hardware acceleration on the PC haven’t really been successful in the long term with developers (re: S3 Metal, 3dfx Glide, Cg). In these cases, the solutions they were trying to solve were superseded by collaborative industry wide interfaces, which is why we think it is far better for us to be putting our efforts into advancing open, industry standards such as OpenCL that will ultimately grow the ecosystem for Stream Computing. This is consistent with AMD’s Open Platform Strategy, and is a more Customer Centric approach in the long term.

TL : DR Nvidia would no doubt cripple AMD performance on Physx in relation to Nvidia performance. Nvidia don't have a history of crippling performance on AMD hardware do they? Oh wait...

Source
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/AMD-PhysX-Havok,news-1950.html


What does any of this matter anyway? Roy saw the light in the end.

VRZ: Moving to CUDA, does this model have a future?

I think CUDA is doomed. Our industry doesn’t like proprietary standards. PhysX is an utter failure because it’s proprietary. Nobody wants it. You don’t want it, I don’t want it, gamers don’t want it. Analysts don’t want it. In the early days of our industry, you could get away with it and it worked. We’ve all had enough of it. They’re unhealthy.

Nvidia should be congratulated for its invention. As a trend, GPGPU is absolutely fantastic and fabulous. But that was then, this is now. Now, collectively our industry doesn’t want a proprietary standard. That’s why people are migrating to OpenCL.

Source
http://vr-zone.com/articles/nimble-like-a-starfish-amds-roy-taylor-sits-down-with-vr-zone/49320.html


For the record AMD Roy is superior to all of you.

 

[Final8y]

I think he was trying to call your bluff, he didn't expect you to provide evidence.

Again wrong he posted what I already knew

Both AMD and NV talk B.S. at times and I'm not obligated to take any of it.