The Next Generation of Graphics APIs

[Kaapstad]

Nothing wrong with expressing an opinion, but perhaps it could and should have been worded better. If you express such a strong opinion about something then people are entitled to react to it. Especially if the opinion expressed goes against the grain of many others. I don't think anyone responded inappropriately to what was said either.

IIRC some people told me I had lost the plot.

 

[LtMatt]

Another take on Mantle from a different programmer. Josh Barczak Lead Graphics Engineer at Firaxis Games.

Mantle gets a lot of flak for being “single-vendor”. It does not have to stay this way, and AMD is clearly willing to standardize it. There is NOTHING in its design that would prevent this. The hurdles involved are political, not technical. While I would obviously prefer one standardized API, I would be willing to use more than one, if it meant that my customers could achieve a significantly better experience. Vendor specific APIs have been done before and are worth at least a thought experiment.

Source
http://www.joshbarczak.com/blog/?p=99
http://www.joshbarczak.com/

IIRC some people told me I had lost the plot.

Well you did find it embarrassing, so yes you did lose the plot. It's to be expected at your age though in all fairness.

 

[Kaapstad]

Another take on Mantle from a different programmer. Josh Barczak Lead Graphics Engineer at Firaxis Games.



Source
http://www.joshbarczak.com/blog/?p=99
http://www.joshbarczak.com/



Well you did find it embarrassing, so yes you did lose the plot. It's to be expected at your age though in all fairness.

The best and fastest way to improve Mantle is to highlight any faults or problems it may have and hopefully get them addressed.

Having said that the same approach does not seen to be working with Dice and BF4.

While we are on the subject of Mantle games, when are we going to get decent CF support for Thief ?

 

[LtMatt]

The best and fastest way to improve Mantle is to highlight any faults or problems it may have and hopefully get them addressed.

Having said that the same approach does not seen to be working with Dice and BF4.

While we are on the subject of Mantle games, when are we going to get decent CF support for Thief ?

AMD & Dice both know there is still work to do. But right now they're working on the system that matter to the large majority of us.

Both AMD and Johan Andersson have told me that Mantle-based multi-GPU support in Battlefield 4 is still in its early phases

I think its clear that with Battlefield 4 there is still work to be done with the Mantle multi-GPU implementation. Both AMD and DICE are forthcoming about this, but I thought it was important to run a set of tests today to have a baseline to measure improvements going forward. There are great signs of what direct access APIs can offer for multiple GPUs in a system - the reliability of frame times with the Core i7-3960X is astounding and bests anything we have seen on DirectX from either AMD or NVIDIA.

Source
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphi...e-CrossFire-Early-Performance-FCAT/Platform-C

They're aware of the problems Kaap, but quad fire setups are of lower priority than single and crossfire setups currently. You'll just have to be patient and in the meantime, use DX. Its not the end of the world is it. Not like you have to use Mantle because DX is terrible.

As for Thief, when Eidos implement it. Its not something AMD can do at driver level. Having said that, ive been told by a reliable source its coming very soon.

 

[Silent_Scone]

I agree, NV's DX isn't that far off at all, especially once we add some more green to the top of the list:





Thief loves some fast CPUs at low resolutions.

hehe. Still 2 fps off my old Ti score

(4960 @ 4.7)

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=25951967&postcount=447

That seems to be the running trend with the Mantle extremists. Faster isn't better!

 

[Kaapstad]

hehe. Still 2 fps off my old Ti score

(4960 @ 4.7)

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=25951967&postcount=447

That seems to be the running trend with the Mantle extremists. Faster isn't better!

I think the Thief bench could do with a good score from your 780ti.

Thing I hate about that Thief bench is my CPU bottlenecks things when I start getting close to 120fps.

 

[Orangey]

I think some of you have missed Kaaps point,, In His situation

TIL Kaap is God.

 

[PhysicsMan94]

Another take on Mantle from a different programmer. Josh Barczak Lead Graphics Engineer at Firaxis Games.

Mantle gets a lot of flak for being “single-vendor”. It does not have to stay this way, and AMD is clearly willing to standardize it. There is NOTHING in its design that would prevent this. The hurdles involved are political, not technical. While I would obviously prefer one standardized API, I would be willing to use more than one, if it meant that my customers could achieve a significantly better experience. Vendor specific APIs have been done before and are worth at least a thought experiment.

I'm not sure how he can imply this, Mantle gives performance increases because of its GCN architecture specific programming, if it was coded for generalised architectures then it would not give the performance increases it currently gives and would essentially be the same thing as DirectX except for perhaps a bit more low-level access and reductions in calls to slow functions.

Barczak here claims that the "hurdles involved are political, not technical", I find this very difficult to believe given my comments above. It is highly unlikely that Mantle already contains code for different architectures (e.g. Nvidia GPUs) and therefore one cannot say that there are no technical hurdles involved.

Furthermore, he then goes on to contradict himself in saying he would be willing to use more than one vendor specific API - implying that he would support Nvidia creating their own graphics API even though it was made quite clear that he thinks there are no technical issues with getting Mantle to work on non-AMD/non-GCN-architecture based hardware.

 

[Silent_Scone]

He's saying the latter because he knows NV will not adopt Mantle.

 

[LtMatt]

I'm not sure how he can imply this, Mantle gives performance increases because of its GCN architecture specific programming, if it was coded for generalised architectures then it would not give the performance increases it currently gives and would essentially be the same thing as DirectX except for perhaps a bit more low-level access and reductions in calls to slow functions.

Barczak here claims that the "hurdles involved are political, not technical", I find this very difficult to believe given my comments above. It is highly unlikely that Mantle already contains code for different architectures (e.g. Nvidia GPUs) and therefore one cannot say that there are no technical hurdles involved.

Furthermore, he then goes on to contradict himself in saying he would be willing to use more than one vendor specific API - implying that he would support Nvidia creating their own graphics API even though it was made quite clear that he thinks there are no technical issues with getting Mantle to work on non-AMD/non-GCN-architecture based hardware.

Well i guess he knows more than you and certainly more than me seeing as he programmes games. He does not work for AMD so there is no reason to lie. If you know different then please share, but i doubt you do. If he is wrong as you state, contact him about it and bring it to light and enlighten us all.

 

[GoogalyMoogaly]

I'm not sure how he can imply this, Mantle gives performance increases because of its GCN architecture specific programming, if it was coded for generalised architectures then it would not give the performance increases it currently gives and would essentially be the same thing as DirectX except for perhaps a bit more low-level access and reductions in calls to slow functions.

Barczak here claims that the "hurdles involved are political, not technical", I find this very difficult to believe given my comments above. It is highly unlikely that Mantle already contains code for different architectures (e.g. Nvidia GPUs) and therefore one cannot say that there are no technical hurdles involved.

Furthermore, he then goes on to contradict himself in saying he would be willing to use more than one vendor specific API - implying that he would support Nvidia creating their own graphics API even though it was made quite clear that he thinks there are no technical issues with getting Mantle to work on non-AMD/non-GCN-architecture based hardware.

I'm a little confused by this statement too.
If the reason it only supports the AMD cards it does is political and not technical, what political reasons are there that have stopped Mantle supporting the 6000, 5000, 4000 series AMD/ATI cards? Who is causing the issues in the AMD/AMD negotiations?

 

[Kaapstad]

Mantle gets a lot of flak for being “single-vendor”. It does not have to stay this way, and AMD is clearly willing to standardize it. There is NOTHING in its design that would prevent this. The hurdles involved are political, not technical. While I would obviously prefer one standardized API, I would be willing to use more than one, if it meant that my customers could achieve a significantly better experience. Vendor specific APIs have been done before and are worth at least a thought experiment.

I'm a little confused by this statement too.
If the reason it only supports the AMD cards it does is political and not technical, what political reasons are there that have stopped Mantle supporting the 6000, 5000, 4000 series AMD/ATI cards? Who is causing the issues in the AMD/AMD negotiations?

The reasons are technical, if AMD are willing to standardise it, this means that there are technical reasons at the moment.

And how long would this standardising take anyway ?

 

[LtMatt]

The reasons are technical, if AMD are willing to standardise it, this means that there are technical reasons at the moment.

And how long would this standardising take anyway ?

Mantle needs to come out of Beta, once that happens it will be standardised. It will happen around the end of year.

 

[PhysicsMan94]

Well i guess he knows more than you and certainly more than me seeing as he programmes games. He does not work for AMD so there is no reason to lie. If you know different then please share, but i doubt you do. If he is wrong as you state, contact him about it and bring it to light and enlighten us all.

I just told you my thoughts, and as far as I am aware everything I commented on is accurate - hence why I am confused as to how Barczak can be making those claims. Of course, I have never even seen a line of Mantle coding before so I'm not exactly sure but from what I've heard of it, Barczak's claims seem off.

Whilst I've never coded anything Mantle related (of course), I do have Direct2D and OpenGL programming experience as well as extensive use of C++ (specifically VC++ in Visual Studio), MATLAB and C# - so I'm not approaching this topic completely blind, as I hope you can appreciate

 

[LtMatt]

I just told you my thoughts, and as far as I am aware everything I commented on is accurate - hence why I am confused as to how Barczak can be making those claims. Of course, I have never even seen a line of Mantle coding before so I'm not exactly sure but from what I've heard of it, Barczak's claims seem off.

Whilst I've never coded anything Mantle related (of course), I do have Direct2D and OpenGL programming experience as well as extensive use of C++ (specifically VC++ in Visual Studio), MATLAB and C# - so I'm not approaching this topic completely blind, as I hope you can appreciate

Who to believe though? Someone who has coded games and is using Mantle now, or you? I'm going with him im afraid. Unless you can give me anything substantial to doubt what him and other game developers continue to say about Mantle. You've not worked with Mantle, so what makes you in any way qualified to dismiss these claims? Please contact him, id like to see where it leads.

 

[Martini1991]

If Mantle was "Open" to be used as a "standard" it'd have more than just AMD's backing vendor wise (I don't just mean Nvidia here)

But obviously you'll take Barczak's word over mine, no worries, and you'll probably continue to do so 2 years in the future as only AMD are peddling Mantle (still).

 

[PhysicsMan94]

Who to believe though? Someone who has coded games and is using Mantle now, or you? I'm going with him im afraid. Unless you can give me anything substantial to doubt what him and other game developers continue to say about Mantle.

To be quite honest, I'm not really fussed whether you agree with him or not - that's up to you - but I explained my position quite clearly from information that has been provided to the general public by AMD and other parties involved with Mantle; and that is that it is an architecture specific API (GCN-based) with no evidence so far that it has been coded for any more architectures (for a start that would require heavy Nvidia involvement for them to be able to program Mantle in order for it work on Nvidia hardware).

 

[LtMatt]

If Mantle was "Open" to be used as a "standard" it'd have more than just AMD's backing vendor wise (I don't just mean Nvidia here)

But obviously you'll take Barczak's word over mine, no worries, and you'll probably continue to do so 2 years in the future as only AMD are peddling Mantle (still).

Mantle will become open, in time.

To be quite honest, I'm not really fussed whether you agree with him or not - that's up to you - but I explained my position quite clearly from information that has been provided to the general public by AMD and other parties involved with Mantle; and that is that it is an architecture specific API (GCN-based) with no evidence so far that it has been coded for any more architectures (for a start that would require heavy Nvidia involvement for them to be able to program Mantle in order for it work on Nvidia hardware).

But we have multiple devs, not amd, saying that is not the case. I see no reason to doubt them.

 

[PhysicsMan94]

You've not worked with Mantle, so what makes you in any way qualified to dismiss these claims? Please contact him, id like to see where it leads.

I do not have the time to contact him nor am I that bothered about the whole situation to do so, rather I have just taken issue with his statements for good reason (as explained above).

 

[LtMatt]

I do not have the time to contact him nor am I that bothered about the whole situation to do so, rather I have just taken issue with his statements for good reason (as explained above).

As i thought.