Mantle Feedback/Bugs

[LtMatt]

Great data and testing here guys, very interesting.

Did find this nugget for those wondering what the advances were on older GCN 1.0 cards with the latest driver and framepacing from the Anandtech R9 295x review.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7930/the-amd-radeon-r9-295x2-review/4

Interesting data there Woodsta. Backs up what i said, that XDMA crossfire is a step up over the previous crossfire implementation.

 

[LtMatt]

Hi Matt,

I had my hand in my pocket for a 4k monitor but this article has changed my mind. Bit risky on expecting smooth performance on a 7990 and a 4k monitor as essentailly all monitors are seen as 2 screens and frametime smoothness still suffers under multimonitor setups.

Bit annoying as I was looking forward to when these £500 Sammys went 'In stock' or the £600 asus.

What to do?

I'd get a 1440P/1600P screen as 3gb vram might be cutting it a bit fine at 4K. One 7990 probably would be a bit lacking grunt wise as well. I guess it all depends on what settings you want to play with and what fps you consider playable. For me id want around 60 fps at high/highest settings, or close to highest settings with sacrificing AA to be happy at 4k. To do that you'll need 2x290's or better imo. However if you don't mind lowering the details then im sure a 7990 would be fine at 4k.

 

[LtMatt]

what's the best way to change the frame pacing? I got BF4 working again LOL

Type this into the console RenderDevice.FramePacingMethod followed by the number.

2-stock
1-works well
0-disabled

I use RenderDevice.FramePacingMethod 1. If you want the extra fps run 0, but the hit from using 1 is quite small.

You can also place this command in your user.cfg file to save having to type it each and every time you play the game.

 

[LtMatt]

What's the point of Frame Pacing Method 2 if all it does is add extra stuttering and lower frame rates? Hope this is fixed in the next driver

LtMatt can you test it in thief?

It doesn't add extra stutter, it makes the game incredibly smooth. Those graphs paint a misleading picture at times. It does hurt fps though because the render times are ridiculously consistent.

Crossfire not working in Thief on Mantle yet. These various frame pacing methods are unique to BF4 currently.

The funny thing is, even a i7 2700k @3.9ghz with 1600mhz ram is not bottlenecking a 290 crossfire setup when using mantle.

 

[LtMatt]

Mines is running great @ 2

Also i ran my 2700K at stock last night and didnt notice any difference in perf from 4.5GHz. Up to 30% CPU usage Thats at all High and 4xMSAA.

Oh.. welcome back Matt

Same and cheers.

Did here and with that other user, without setting frame pacing to 1 I noticed it was giving the odd stutter, where as DX was smooth.

DX = Smooth
FP 1 = Higher frames, smooth
FP 2 = More frame rate drops and stuttering

Correct, it did initially. However it works fine for me now so im wondering if perhaps it was fixed between then and now. There has been one game update and a server update since i last tried it. Still lowers my fps, but method 2 works fine (smoothly) for me now.

 

[LtMatt]

Another game gets Mantle support. Civilization: Beyond Earth.



Source
https://twitter.com/NThibieroz

 

[LtMatt]

I would expect this type of game to get the most possible benefit from Mantle being cpu heavy.

 

[LtMatt]

Surely Mantle frees up CPU from rendering graphics though? RTS games are often pretty simple graphics but hard on the CPU because of CPU tasks aren't they? I always assumed performance was an issue due to the amount of things happening in parallel as opposed to the complexity of what was being displayed.
Total War games are probably an exception there.

Mantle is so efficient on the cpu side of things id expect big gains. Time will tell.

 

[LtMatt]

Crytek to implement CG quality graphics in Mantle using Cryengine.

 

[LtMatt]

Mantle whitepaper document released.

http://www.amd.com/Documents/Mantle_White_Paper.pdf

 

[LtMatt]

So i had to reconfigure my joystick settings earlier as it seemed like my joystick bindings for jets were a little borked. Decided to just delete the settings folder and start it over.

Now i have it set up for jets tho it probably needs some tweaking but i thought i'd give Ultra a go for some silly reason. Anyway i did a full round on Shanghai with a full server and my VRAM only maxed to 2.8GB. Did Dice do something on their end or was it me deleting the settings file? Hmm

Either way i'll be running Ultra/4xMSAA for a while and see how it goes. May need to drop down to 2xMSAA just for that assured smoothness on multiplayer

Mantle vram usage is getting lower with every patch. Seems like its a work in progress.

 

[LtMatt]

Hi Matt.. Do u think this is something they wudnt bother announcing then?

I doubt they announce every change and tweak.

 

[LtMatt]

Be nice if they just mentioned they were working on it and sorting it out. I've not seen anyone say this.

Its like getting blood out of a stone from Johan on twitter when i ask about Mantle bugs/issues. Still at least i have him and a few of the Dice devs following me though.

 

[LtMatt]

Cool.. keep on em Matt

Always.

 

[LtMatt]

Mantle is total rubbish on 4 cards in BF4 I have just tried it in a couple of quick games with the CPU @4.0 and the cards at stock max settings @1600p. In one game I was averaging about 103 fps and in another about 88 fps, the mins and maxs did not move very much which was good though.

I then switched to DX11 using the same max settings and the CPU still @4.0, what a difference. The minimums were over 140fps, the average was about 170fps and the max I don't know because the frame counter spent a lot of time @200fps.

I suspect there is no 4 card Mantle support yet from what I have seen.

Kaap you're a noob.

Place this config file in your BF4 game.exe folder and test again.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/v5knn0

Mantles default frame pacing method sacrifices fps to keep frame times ridiculously consistent. This config uses a more balanced frame pacing method. (mantle has three different methods)

EDIT

If you're already using my config, then i apologise and i will speak to Thracks/Warsam and ask them why four card support is not working.

 

[LtMatt]

I am trying to make sense of the link, I am not sure what I am supposed to be downloading.

Lol. Can we adopt you and your wealth of gpu's?



Click where the arrow points.

 

[LtMatt]

I have downloaded a file called

setup.exe.ffoodgs

Is this the right one ?

Jesus christ man, you're killing me.

I have no idea what file that is. Hold on ill use a different host. What you downloaded sounds like some ad thing from sendspace, so delete it. The file im sharing is a notepad User.cfg file.

Try this one.

http://www.filedropper.com/user_1

 

[LtMatt]

Got it working, average fps in Mantle is now about the same as DX11. The difference is DX11 has higher and lower maxs and mins.

Mantle also seems to be very glitchy visually where as DX11 is glitch free, maybe this is something to do with Quadfire and Mantle.

You can always try disabling frame pacing altogether as well Kaap. Type RanderDevice.FramePacingMethod 0 into console. Or open that User.cfg file and change the 1 to a 0 and click save.

Keep an eye on the vram usage. It should display near the top of the screen when running Mantle. If you exceed the limit then that could explain dips in performance. If you're just running 1600P Ultra preset you should have plenty of vram.

For me on two card Mantle is different class compared to DX.

 

[LtMatt]

Here are my crossfire results using Mantle in the game Thief. I have to say i think AMD's DirectX cpu overhead performance needs some work at 1080P under DX. Nvidia offer better DX cpu overhead performance at this resolution in this game. However Mantle blows both vendors DX11 performance out of the water completely, which is great.

System Specs

[email protected]
290P Crossfire @1250/1625
16GB DDR3 2133Mhz
14.6 Beta
Win8.1 64 Bit


1080P Mantle

Spoiler

1080P Nvidia DX

4770K @ 4.7 TitanSli @ 1280/1895

Spoiler

1080P DX

Spoiler

1440P Mantle

Spoiler

1440P DX

Spoiler