Mantle allows VRAM to be combined from all cards installed

[VincentHanna]

Isn't that sig a bit inflammatory/on the nose Dave2150?

 

[Gregster]

Gregster, Master Fisherman

Rubbish. I love a good debate and really enjoy hardware technology. PC gaming is something I really enjoy doing and have done since I was around 13 years old and they were called Spectrums and Commodores back then. I don't bait people but I have a sense of humour, which gets lost on some people, either because they are biased or they just don't like me but the bottom line for me is I want my fellow gamers to enjoy their game on whatever brand of GPU they use as much as me. If AMD do something good, I give them full credit for it and if nVidia do something good, I do the same. If AMD do something bad, I mock them and the same for nVidia. I don't get all wrapped up in "Camps/teams" and enjoy hardware debates with enthusiasts alike.

Now I praised AMD for the potential to use stackable VRAM (as I did in the past) and this is something that would really help AMD out with 4K being reasonably big talk. You imagine having a pair of 290X's and enough grunt to run a game at max details but not enough VRAM with it being limited to 4GB but add stackable VRAM in and your usable 4GB is now 8GB. I think that is something worth AMD forcing onto devs

You are absolutely right, there are many extremely knowledgeable and helpful folks on the forum, and its fine to be very passionate about a certain vendor if brand loyalty floats your boat, but it does often turn in to a tribal mentality with 'red vs green' spewing venom at each other, it just makes me sad as it spoils the environment of the forum when at the end of the day we all like PC's and gaming and technology etc so really we should all be on the same page regardless of what colour our GPU's are!

Spot on. I am a nVidia fan and I don't hide it but I still want my AMD brothers to game in the same way I do. Enthusiasts are a fickle bunch at times and hatred for the opposition has no place in society in my book.

 

[tommybhoy]

Rubbish, obtuse and double entendre spring to mind, shown by comments in this thread alone.

 

[Tonester0011]

Rubbish.

Why do you have to do that all the time ^^^^
Why can't you just be happy for AMD, always so critical of everything they do.

This could be a great jump for gamers, not having to share VRAM.

 

[Martini1991]

AMD give you more VRAM and Nvidia take it off you

 

[Gregster]

Why do you have to do that all the time ^^^^
Why can't you just be happy for AMD, always so critical of everything they do.

This could be a great jump for gamers, not having to share VRAM.

Agreed. AMD are onto something good if they can get the devs to implement it into a few games with Mantle and I don't feel it is rubbish at all.

 

[Gregster]

AMD give you more VRAM and Nvidia take it off you

 

[tommybhoy]

Why do you have to do that all the time ^^^^

What, paint the blindingly obvious?

If I was alone on this train of thought it wouldn't get mentioned, however coming from someone that likes to chase shankly, humbug and alxandy round the forum, I imagine you point has raised a few eyebrows.

Why can't you just be happy for AMD, always so critical of everything they do.

This could be a great jump for gamers, not having to share VRAM.

Don't have an opinion, until I'm looking for more than what I have available, it doesn't matter.

 

[SiDeards73]

Agreed. AMD are onto something good if they can get the devs to implement it into a few games with Mantle and I don't feel it is rubbish at all.

Aww cmon Greg you know i was only messing with yah i agree though mate with the above statement, however i feel AMD have missed the boat on this now, as DX12 is going to be doing the same as Mantle, people are going to forget Mantle exists as DX behemoth trundles over it, taking its innovation and improving upon it.

However i have my reservations that a lot of lazy developers will still carry on with their sloppy console ports just to line the pockets of the people in charge. I believe XBone is getting Dx12 right? any word if PS4 will get it?

Problem i see is the majority of PC gamers are 1080p, AMD / Nvidia market the bulk of their cards for this market, so the cards are probably going to stay 4GB for a good while longer, and then probably towards the end of their life they will release 8gb versions to squeeze a bit more cash outta people before releasing the next batch.

 

[LambChop]

That's what I 'love' about AMD. They cant get Mantle itself in games, nevermind their fabled Trueaudio. What I am expecting however, is for this to be added to their list of 'features' which will never appear and if they do, might show up in literally 1 or 2 games at most.

 

[TheRealDeal]

What i find interesting is with Mantle it's up to the game developers to support multi card scaling so in dx12 this might be the case as well. So instead of multi card getting better and pooling the vram it might just go the opposite way of game developers being really lazy and not bothering to write in multi gpu support. At the very least Mantle cf support seems to come after release. There could be a lot of unhappy people on here with up to 3 redundant cards in some dx12 games. This is the danger i see in leaving more up to the already lazy PC devs.

 

[Gregster]

Aww cmon Greg you know i was only messing with yah i agree though mate with the above statement, however i feel AMD have missed the boat on this now, as DX12 is going to be doing the same as Mantle, people are going to forget Mantle exists as DX behemoth trundles over it, taking its innovation and improving upon it.

However i have my reservations that a lot of lazy developers will still carry on with their sloppy console ports just to line the pockets of the people in charge. I believe XBone is getting Dx12 right? any word if PS4 will get it?

Problem i see is the majority of PC gamers are 1080p, AMD / Nvidia market the bulk of their cards for this market, so the cards are probably going to stay 4GB for a good while longer, and then probably towards the end of their life they will release 8gb versions to squeeze a bit more cash outta people before releasing the next batch.

All cool Si and apologies for the abrupt "Rubbish".

And I quite agree. We have seen recent game ports with little to no optimisations for our beloved PCs and devs not really giving consideration to how much VRAM the average gamer has. A few games are using a big chunk of VRAM but not requiring that much GPU grunt to run at max settings, so people are having to dial down the settings to get the game to run. I believe SoM was an example of that.

I do feel DX12 for AMD and nVidia and Mantle for AMD users could change that but I am far from knowledgeable in programming and don't know if it is easy (I assume not or we would have seen it by now in Mantle games) but if AMD and nVidia both get behind the devs and basically do the work for them, stackable VRAM could become quite common in newer DX12/Mantle games. The PC gaming industry is growing but we are still taking a back seat to the consoles and I would love to see the tide turn.

Not sure how that would work with Tri/Quad mind and if it would be even possible... Anyone?

 

[Orangey]

Huddy being Huddy.

Different RH.

Although I do like the term "Huddy gonna Hudd".

 

[SiDeards73]

I think the reason we dont see a lot of Mantle is because firstly they need to make the game for as many hardware options as possible so it has to be very generic to begin with, stuff like Mantle either has to be implemented at the very start and agreed upon, or done after somehow, either way it requires a dev to do it which means extra cost.

However with DX12, they have the upper hand as pretty much every game going forward will be built upon it, even if its totally different from dx11 devs are going to need to learn to use it, and if your learning a new language you will learn all aspects of it i guess.

So imho Mantle unfortunately has lost its chance to really be something brilliant, rather than just good in a few titles, where as DX12 will surpass it and show what can be achieved and what Mantle could have been.

 

[queamin]

What, paint the blindingly obvious?

If I was alone on this train of thought it wouldn't get mentioned, however coming from someone that likes to chase shankly, humbug and alxandy round the forum, I imagine you point has raised a few eyebrows.




Don't have an opinion, until I'm looking for more than what I have available, it doesn't matter.

I thought the same and Greg a big boy now he can stand up for himself, he will reply to humbugs post if he wants to with out help from you because to me you are stalking humbug and a few others it is creepy really.

 

[Silent_Scone]

Here comes the lockodile crocodile.

 

[Gregster]

Spoiler

Old story

Possible in Theory

Not going to happen.

It already has.



Indeed it does.

http://community.amd.com/community/...preme-in-sid-meiers-civilization-beyond-earth

So you can use up to 8GB of VRAM on a pair of 290s for instance?

Civ BE does Split Frame Rendering, so unless they are implementing it differently to how Mantle works. yes.

Just because a game uses SFR, it doesn't make it use the memory of each card and allow it to stack.

Thats what Split Frame Rendering is, each GPU handles one half of the screen independently.

Instead of two GPU's rendering the full image through the master Memory pool the image is split in half with each GPU rendering one half.

The former is two GPU's acting as one, like one big GPU. hence the doubling of performance, the latter is two GPU's working independently on the same task, less performance but lower latency.

There is no "Stacking" of the Memory, it's a side effect of the GPU's still being independent of eachother and having their own buffer.

Stacking is also the wrong word for what you are describing, "Stacking" is more a kin to traditional Multi-GPU.

------

It seems BF4 is also capable of it.

http://www.slideshare.net/DICEStudio/rendering-battlefield-4-with-mantle

nVidia have been doing SFR for a long time but the VRAM doesn't stack. You are reading too much into it and whilst it is possible to stack VRAM, it hasn't happened yet, as AMD would be singing it from the rooftops.

They haven't managed to get it to work, they don't even officially support it.

It has happened, CiV BE uses it.

Sorry Humbug but again I say you are reading too much into it. SFR can stack VRAM but at present it doesn't on AMD cards. You are taking 2+2 and making 5.

Oh of course AMD are lying and i should believe you out of hand because?

Gregester is the expert on all this, and he would never lie, right?

Pull the other one.

What do Nvidia have to do with it? Gregster is the one who wants me to believe him instead of the industry who implement this stuff, he's had a tantrum because i don't buy it.

It has nothing to do with Nvidia.

Pwnd

 

[Martini1991]

Owned.

 

[Orangey]

We should say heaping instead of stacking, to avoid confusion with chip stacking.

 

[Tonester0011]

Stop following humbug around