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AMD and low level APIs effect on CPU choices.

Soldato
Joined
11 Oct 2007
Posts
2,597
It occurred to me recently that the only thing Mantle needed to accomplish, was the adoption of low level APIs by the industry, to get the most out of their CPUs, and it worked.

With the adoption of DX12 and Vulcan and possibly still Mantle AMD may see tremendous gains on their CPUs for gaming and indeed anything that utilises these APIs.

Now apparently these low level APIs are more noticeable on low to mid range CPUs, which is pretty much everything AMD is currently knocking out. It should also benefit low/med end intel CPUs but essentially it should drastically reduce the need for expensive CPUs in high end gaming systems, which should open up greater market share for AMD.

I guess it really comes down to the adoption rate of these APIs but it seems that developers are falling over themselves to get onboard, most probably because of the greater market they can enjoy on lower and medium powered gaming systems.


I'm actually wondering if AMDs differing architecture will shine under these API conditions. I'd love to see some comparisons of old and new APIs with both Intel and AMD chips over a range of games but I expect the performance bottleneck to overwhelmingly revert to the GFX card. We will have to wait until Release and utilisation of these APIs to get a real feel for changes.

From what I have seen around the optimum CPU at the moment seems to be 6 core (or perhaps just 6 threads) CPUs, This could just be the DX12 variant though and it's still in development.

I'm actually wondering if this carries through we will see 6 core CPUs rather than 8 with the silicon quota of the last 2 cores used to higher the performance of the remaining 6, but perhaps further development in the APIs will remove this possibility.

As someone who was looking at a base system upgrade this year it's really a confusing time, Skylake seems to be worth waiting for over a Devils Canyon, Low level APIs again are a consideration, and then there is AMDs Zen next year which may radically change the market if the hype is anything like the finished product at any rate.

What are you guys thinking?
 
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I am thinking a lot of things are developed on intel and amd support is an after thought.
example, flash player one of the biggies( I play an online mmo via browser using flash),
on i5 all 4 cores used, fx6100 only 3/6 used, which is surprising as multithreading was added years ago to the flash/actionscript backend.
 
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To be fair, flash needs to die, hmtl5 is supposed to be fazing it out isn't it? well if developers do their thing. Well I've heard it pretty much does everything flash does, may be instances it doesn't, will have to read up.
 
Which to some extent is why mantle wasn't such an epic fail as some made out. It is going to take time to reap the benefits of the new API's but it is very welcome!
 
Mantle wasn't a fail. At all. If anything it made other devs sit up and take note and realise just how old and bad DX11 is.

OP is right though. AMD are trying to eliminate the CPU side which will make their APUs better than they are now and so they can show off their GPU part of the APU which puts Intel's GPU to shame.
 
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