***Official AMD Mantle Thread***

[Bonjour]

Conversely, my 8320 benefits greatly from Mantle and will hopefully benefit equally from DX12.

 

[humbug]

On high end i7/GPU setups in demanding situations there is hardly any difference between using Mantle and DX11 and worse still at extreme levels DX11 has a habit of performing better. This is a situation that is only going to get worse for Mantle with the arrival of the 300 series.

Not everyone can afford £400 to £900 CPU's.

And you're missing something else, The more powerful GPU's become the more important it is to get more and more efficient API's

Kaap i can easily make something that will run fine on just one of your GPU's if it wasn't for the fact that your £900 CPU was ground to a halt.

I'm not kidding... Deliberate LOD and Shader gimping to keep the CPU from crawling across the frying pan is a constant battle in Game Development.

 

[Noctifer]

On high end i7/GPU setups in demanding situations there is hardly any difference between using Mantle and DX11 and worse still at extreme levels DX11 has a habit of performing better. This is a situation that is only going to get worse for Mantle with the arrival of the 300 series.

This might be the case for games like BF4 and Thief. But the situation changes when you add MMORPG's to the mix. I got a Core i5 at 4.2Ghz (I know, not the highest clock possible on air) and it still struggles to feed my 7970 at stock with enough data when playing WoW. Before the game added new AA options in the latest patch my GPU usage was around 60% with Ultra details.

If someone would prefer to play at 120FPS or higher with a more powerful GPU or two GPU's, he is still going to be CPU bound at around 50-60 FPS (if not less) in raids.

Outside of Star Swarm there hasn't been a single game that really has massive CPU bottlenecks (perhaps Beyond Earth when zooming out) to really show Mantle/DX12/Vulkan.

 

[Kaapstad]

you think devs arnt using opengl? really?

I think the game devs are taking the micky when it comes to Mantle.

AMD give them Mantle.

The game devs say it is the greatest thing since.......

If it then finds it's way into a game the game devs don't give it anything like the support that it deserves.

AMD have put a lot of effort into Mantle and are not getting the return they should from the game devs.

 

[5960xNvidiaGamer]

This might be the case for games like BF4 and Thief. But the situation changes when you add MMORPG's to the mix. I got a Core i5 at 4.2Ghz (I know, not the highest clock possible on air) and it still struggles to feed my 7970 at stock with enough data when playing WoW. Before the game added new AA options in the latest patch my GPU usage was around 60% with Ultra details.

If someone would prefer to play at 120FPS or higher with a more powerful GPU or two GPU's, he is still going to be CPU bound at around 50-60 FPS (if not less) in raids.

Outside of Star Swarm there hasn't been a single game that really has massive CPU bottlenecks (perhaps Beyond Earth when zooming out) to really show Mantle/DX12/Vulkan.

For me there is a big difference using Mantle over DX on BF4.

 

[Kaapstad]

Not everyone can afford £400 to £900 CPU's.

And you're missing something else, The more powerful GPU's become the more important it is to get more and more efficient API's

Kaap i can easily make something that will run fine on just one of your GPU's if it wasn't for the fact that your £900 CPU was ground to a halt.

I'm not kidding... Deliberate LOD and Shader gimping to keep the CPU from crawling across the frying pan is a constant battle in Game Development.

The point I am trying to make has not got anything to do with who can afford what.

I am trying to look at it from an AMD business point of view, they are there to sell graphics cards and look forward.

I think one reason that never gets mentioned why NVidia are not interested in something like Mantle is it does work with older hardware. This goes totally against NVidias way of doing business, the last thing they want is for their users to stay on hardware that is 3 or 4 years old. NVidia would much rather their users upgrade regularly to the latest hardware, giving their customers something like Mantle would slow that process down. Whether this is the right or wrong way to do business NVidia sell a lot of cards.

 

[humbug]

The point I am trying to make has not got anything to do with who can afford what.

I am trying to look at it from an AMD business point of view, they are there to sell graphics cards and look forward.

I think one reason that never gets mentioned why NVidia are not interested in something like Mantle is it does work with older hardware. This goes totally against NVidias way of doing business, the last thing they want is for their users to stay on hardware that is 3 or 4 years old. NVidia would much rather their users upgrade regularly to the latest hardware, giving their customers something like Mantle would slow that process down. Whether this is the right or wrong way to do business NVidia sell a lot of cards.

As i explained, there is more to Gaming than Graphics Cards, to look forward you have to look beyond the hardware because its not just the hardware thats holding you back, its the API its sitting on.
So AMD looked to the future and realised they need to move the API forward, they set out to do that, successfully.

Now comes the new Graphics Card....

 

[Noctifer]

For me there is a big difference using Mantle over DX on BF4.

I am not saying there isn't. But BF4 at high IQ and high resolution is probably not going to have CPU bottleneck when playing on a high end Intel CPU with good cooling and OC. But WoW is still going to have a CPU bottleneck even though it's the same system.

The difference Mantle would make in WoW compared to BF4 would be huge.

 

[ltron]

Not everyone can afford £400 to £900 CPU's.

And you're missing something else, The more powerful GPU's become the more important it is to get more and more efficient API's

Kaap i can easily make something that will run fine on just one of your GPU's if it wasn't for the fact that your £900 CPU was ground to a halt.

I'm not kidding... Deliberate LOD and Shader gimping to keep the CPU from crawling across the frying pan is a constant battle in Game Development.

I agree with the above. Also, I think that games like BF4 are designed around the limitations of d3d11, so are not pushing more draw calls per frame than dx11 can handle (and it's a struggle even to do that with modern games). It's amazing that we see an improvement with these games considering this, even the small one when using high-end CPUs.

I expect games designed from the ground up for Mantle/DX12/Vulkan would show a huge performance improvement, even on high end CPUs, if the number of draw calls per frame is more than d3d11 can handle and the game is not completely GPU limited; which is more likely to be the case if GPUs continue to become more powerful at a much faster rate than CPUs.

Also, lower level APIs seem to help more with minimum fps, frame times and smoothness in current games than average fps anyway.

 

[humbug]

I agree with the above. Also, I think that games like BF4 are designed around the limitations of d3d11, so are not pushing more draw calls per frame than dx11 can handle (and it's a struggle even to do that with modern games). It's amazing that we see an improvement with these games considering this, even the small one when using high-end CPUs.

I expect games designed from the ground up for Mantle/DX12/Vulkan would show a huge performance improvement, even on high end CPUs, if the number of draw calls per frame is more than d3d11 can handle and the game is not completely GPU limited; which is more likely to be the case if GPUs continue to become more powerful at a much faster rate than CPUs.

Also, lower level APIs seem to help more with minimum fps, frame times and smoothness in current games than average fps anyway.

Do you remember how originally that game had lots of lovely lush green foliage? do you remember how it all used to move violently whenever there was an explosion nearby, or when a chopper came near it... as you would expect in real life.

Its a pretty drab and static place these days, what devs want and what they are limited to are miles apart, and you can't make two of the same game, one for DX and one for Mantle.

 

[ltron]

The point I am trying to make has not got anything to do with who can afford what.

I am trying to look at it from an AMD business point of view, they are there to sell graphics cards and look forward.

I think one reason that never gets mentioned why NVidia are not interested in something like Mantle is it does work with older hardware. This goes totally against NVidias way of doing business, the last thing they want is for their users to stay on hardware that is 3 or 4 years old. NVidia would much rather their users upgrade regularly to the latest hardware, giving their customers something like Mantle would slow that process down. Whether this is the right or wrong way to do business NVidia sell a lot of cards.

This may be true now in current games, but will this necessarily be true in games that will be built with these lower level APIs in mind and are not even possible with current APIs irrespective of hardware.

If these future games have huge battles with many thousands of units on screen that may be too much for a lower-end CPU to run no matter how efficient the API. So we are merely replacing an artificial bottleneck, which is due to inefficient software, with a real one and everyone gets much more impressive graphics and much more out of their hardware, potentially. You'll still need to upgrade to experience this at max settings.

Brad Wardell of Stardock said games at the end of this console generation will be like Helm's Deep from Lord of the Rings: http://www.dsogaming.com/news/stard...-battle-of-helms-deep-from-lotr-in-real-time/

 

[ltron]

Do you remember how originally that game had lots of lovely lush green foliage? do you remember how it all used to move violently whenever there was an explosion nearby, or when a chopper came near it... as you would expect in real life.

Its a pretty drab and static place these days, what devs want and what they are limited to are miles apart, and you can't make two of the same game, one for DX and one for Mantle.

Precisely, but my point was that this is the reason why we're not seeing huge improvements in games at the moment on very high-end hardware with Mantle.

However, in the future I hope that there will come a time when the vast majority of people have access to a lower-level API and game developers no longer have these limitations. I would expect a huge increase in performance and what's possible in these circumstances on all hardware, not just lower-end.

 

[humbug]

Precisely, but my point was that this is the reason why we're not seeing huge improvements in games at the moment on very high-end hardware with Mantle.

However, in the future I hope that there will come a time when the vast majority of people have access to a lower-level API and game developers no longer have these limitations. I would expect a huge increase in performance and what's possible in these circumstances on all hardware, not just lower-end.

Yep

 

[GoogalyMoogaly]

Do you remember how originally that game had lots of lovely lush green foliage? do you remember how it all used to move violently whenever there was an explosion nearby, or when a chopper came near it... as you would expect in real life.

Its a pretty drab and static place these days, what devs want and what they are limited to are miles apart, and you can't make two of the same game, one for DX and one for Mantle.

This is something I always thought when AMD released Mantle. Unless games designers decided to just use Mantle then games would always have been limited to some degree by what was possible with DX11.

I know that a lot of the usual faces in the AMD crew were swearing blind that Mantle would be open and have a public SDK, but it was hard to believe that even if it did that Nvidia and Intel would adopt it. So without it being multi-vendor it didn't seem like it could be used to its fullest.

DX12 on the other hand seemed like it really could be a game changer and hopefully it will be.

Also Huddy said back in that video that started about 6 threads that even when DX12 came out that AMD felt there was a place for Mantle even though a number of developers would likely switch to DX12. Are we now saying that Huddy can't be trusted? Or just that anything AMD say is only valid for the length of time it takes them to say it?
Let's wait and see what is announced on Thursday before condeming Mantle to the history books.

Of course after all the fuss that is made over GSync and PhysX being proprietry and GameWorks not running well on non-Nvidia hardware I imagine a lot of AMD owners will abandon Mantle on principle if it doesn't become open?

 

[mmj_uk]

I think the game devs are taking the micky when it comes to Mantle.

AMD give them Mantle.

The game devs say it is the greatest thing since.......

If it then finds it's way into a game the game devs don't give it anything like the support that it deserves.

AMD have put a lot of effort into Mantle and are not getting the return they should from the game devs.

Most non-indie developers are at the mercy of their publishers whose only language is money, the days of developers taking pride in their games is mostly gone. You need to look at it from a publishers perspective, why mess about having to support Mantle with no benefit to themselves when they could put all of that extra time and money into additional paid DLC?

Developers can like Mantle all they want but they are usually given strict deadlines by their publishers to finish the game, Mantle is only going to cost them more time and money as well as giving them more technical support headaches post-release of the game.

It boggles the mind that AMD thought Mantle could succeed long term when they eventually stopped writing cheques, the only reason NVidia get their software technologies in games because they invest manpower into most games during their development and get it done themselves.

 

[LtMatt]

Our friends at Dice have released a new patch for Battlefield 4 today and part of the patch notes caught my eye.


- PC - Several AMD Mantle optimizations
- PC - Various graphical performance improvements

 

[~>Dg<~]

simply put if it requires time and extra effort devs wont use it. unless paid too.

what baffles me its simple to see this.

 

[LtMatt]

simply put if it requires time and extra effort devs wont use it. unless paid too.

what baffles me its simple to see this.

It baffles me that people think we paid developers to use Mantle.

Mantle is an optional API. Developers choose to use it or they don't, it's really that simple.

 

[eyetrip]

Our friends at Dice have released a new patch for Battlefield 4 today and part of the patch notes caught my eye.


- PC - Several AMD Mantle optimizations
- PC - Various graphical performance improvements

Hmmmmmmmmmm. Am planning to work most of night, but may fire up just one quick round.

Provided the update is already installed.

It's one game I play where crossfire actually works....

 

[Martini1991]

I wish AMD had put their money where their mouth is with Mantle, pay devs to use it etc.