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Anandtech: Benchmarked – Civilization: Beyond Earth

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AMDMatt said:
Here's an interesting fact that anandtech didn't touch on. Mantle actually uses a higher quality AA pass, so they have improved AA vs alternatives. This has a higher performance cost, but thanks to Mantle Radeons are able to remain competitive and in some cases faster. You really get the best of both worlds. DirectX uses MSAA and AMD's Mantle uses EQAA. Quite impressive when you look at the performance numbers. :cool:
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That is interesting Matt, I do hope you can turn off this feature though, as we do not want to have a situation where any benchmarks that use Mantle are actually running different settings than everything else making them useless in an apples to apples comparison.
 
bru said:
That is interesting Matt, I do hope you can turn off this feature though, as we do not want to have a situation where any benchmarks that use Mantle are actually running different settings than everything else making them useless in an apples to apples comparison.
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It can't be disabled Bru, however you can lower the quality of it if needed. This was the decision of the developer to give Mantle the 'edge' in this game. It will have all the things you can expect of Mantle though, smoother performance, more consistent frame times and variance and in this case, superior AA quality which does cost more performance than MSAA. The fact it's able to remain competitive (and in some cases faster) speaks volumes though.
 
AMDMatt said:
It can't be disabled Bru, however you can lower the quality of it if needed. This was the decision of the developer to give Mantle the 'edge' in this game. It will have all the things you can expect of Mantle though, smoother performance, more consistent frame times and variance and in this case, superior AA quality which does cost more performance than MSAA. The fact it's able to remain competitive (and in some cases faster) speaks volumes though.
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Yes it does remain competitive which at the moment is good.

I just hope that it doesn't become an excuse latter down the line 'if' things move around to allow Nvidia pull ahead by some margin.

I can see it now 'Well if mantle wasn't doing better AA it would be faster.....bleat bleat bleat' ;):D;)
 
bru said:
That is interesting Matt, I do hope you can turn off this feature though, as we do not want to have a situation where any benchmarks that use Mantle are actually running different settings than everything else making them useless in an apples to apples comparison.
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Yeah but what Matt and AMD fail to tell you that say X4 EQAA granted will give you better performance, is not as nice as x4 MSAA, but they run it in Mantles benchmarks with a quality hit to get higher numbers.
 
bru said:
Yes it does remain competitive which at the moment is good.

I just hope that it doesn't become an excuse latter down the line 'if' things move around to allow Nvidia pull ahead by some margin.

I can see it now 'Well if mantle wasn't doing better AA it would be faster.....bleat bleat bleat' ;):D;)
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I know there is a day 0 patch coming as i think there are some multi gpu issues for both api's. Firaxis is a solid developer though so I've got every faith that any issues will be rectified quickly and to all our satisfaction.

I will share some more information about Mantles multi gpu capabilities in this game soon. Anandtech touched on it briefly. Basically it will offer the smoothness and latency of a single powerful gpu when using up to four Radeon cards in Mantle. It will feel really nice, coupled with Mantles ridiculously consistent frame time and variance already. :cool:

One of the interesting aspects with Civilization: Beyond Earth is that the developers, Firaxis, have opted to include support for AMD's Mantle API. We've been over this subject quite a few times, but the core idea is that Mantle provides low level access to the graphics hardware, potentially allowing for improved performance or other improvements. We've seen other games use Mantle (Battlefield 4, Thief, Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare, and Sniper Elite 3), but this is the first game to really do something more with Mantle than reducing the cost of draw calls. That's still a benefit that Civilization: Beyond Earth enjoys, but Firaxis has gone a step further for owners of CrossFire setups and has enabled a custom Split-Frame Rendering (SFR) approach for multiple GPUs instead of the typical Alternate-Frame Rendering (AFR) that most games use with CrossFire and SLI. I like the idea of SFR, as it means adding multiple GPUs won't increase input latency, but it can be far more complex to implement (which is why most games choose to go with AFR).
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DirectX will continue to use AFR by the way.
 
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Ian Evey said:
So is EQAA the same as nvidia CSAA ?

looks very similar in terms of what it does.
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It is.

Maybe the benchmarks should be ran again with CSAA and EQAA used, but then again, that would mean AMD would have to show Nvidia on top, and that's not going to happen.

So a standard 290x uses MSAA in DX, and standard 290x with mantle uses EQAA is used.... sounds like to me there's very little difference between DX and Mantle in this game but let's drop the AA quality in Mantle so it pulls ahead.
 
LambChop said:
It is.

Maybe the benchmarks should be ran again with CSAA and EQAA used, but then again, that would mean AMD would have to show Nvidia on top, and that's not going to happen.

So a standard 290x uses MSAA in DX, and standard 290x with mantle uses EQAA is used.... sounds like to me there's very little difference between DX and Mantle in this game but let's drop the AA quality in Mantle so it pulls ahead.
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EQAA is better image quality than MSAA, it’s not possible for it to be worse.
 
Great amd and Mantle makes gamers have more and better experience again playing games.
Best framevariance in the business and you dont hear any nvidia talk about framevariance anymore they gone silent due to them cant voice their opinion...as they have a worse solution atm. Funny how that works.

Seems a 290x is the card to have yet again for new games.
superb price/performance with added Mantle godness, not sure why anyone be buying other brands really.

Myers games tends to be cpu heavy also for turns.
 
flopper said:
Great amd and Mantle makes gamers have more and better experience again playing games.
Best framevariance in the business and you dont hear any nvidia talk about framevariance anymore they gone silent due to them cant voice their opinion...as they have a worse solution atm. Funny how that works.

Seems a 290x is the card to have yet again for new games.
superb price/performance with added Mantle godness, not sure why anyone be buying other brands really.

Myers games tends to be cpu heavy also for turns.
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I'm pretty sure you didn't actually look at the anandtech article.
 
Baboonanza said:
Well, it's supposed to be. This describes it pretty well: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4061/amds-radeon-hd-6970-radeon-hd-6950/10

Assuming that's correct it's certainly fair to bench mark 4x MSAA against 4xEQAA. The EQAA should actually be doing ever so slightly more work even if you subjectively prefer MSAA.
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Not disagreeing that it does more work, but it certainly isn't fair to bench systems with different settings.
It allows much more room for excuses from either side. But I suppose it will keep us lot on the forums entertained with even more things to argue over. :p:D:p
 
I think the interesting benchmarks for Mantle will be with less mighty CPUs. If Mantle is working as intended you would expect AMD cards to perform relatively better, particularly as this game should be more CPU bounds than other Mantle titles.
 
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