Running 20fps on PS2 with a 280x?

[Marine-RX179]

This is not necessarily true at all.

Mantle helps alleviate CPU bottleneck for GPU queued tasks.

MMOs and PS2 are CPU intensive games because...THEY ARE CPU intensive games. Not because the GPU workload is CPU bottlenecked.

Mantle does not make CPU power irrelevant in such titles. If an MMO needs to calculate using the CPU then it will and Mantle will make sod all difference.

I'm not sure why all of a sudden people think Mantle can solve problems that......Mantle cannot solve.

I'm not sure if you play much MMOs, but graphic card get bottlenecked by CPU ALL THE TIME! It's very common to have GPU usage dipping down to 40-60% at intensive battles, while CPU usage is at maxed (maxed in the 90-100% on the cores depending on the number of threads the game engine would use).

Nobody is arguing games like PS2 isn't a CPU intensive game, but the thing is the excessive CPU overheads of the high-level access is making it EVEN MORE intensive than it needed to be, which is why having low-level access and reducing uncesssary CPU overheads will reduce the stress that are being placed on the CPU, thus improve performance.

 

[PhysicsMan94]

Personally, I'd like to see a bigger shift towards utilising the graphics card for physics, AI and other calculations which are usually done on the CPU. The highly parallel nature of the GPU makes it ideal for a lot of these computations, which is why the Compute Shader pipeline was introduced with Direct3D 11 (and Mantle uses a similar feature I believe) - moving data off of the CPU and onto the GPU for mass processing during moments where there isn't an awful lot of rendering for the graphics card to do certainly allows for much greater performance (especially in MMOs like PS2).

Hopefully, as we seem to be moving towards a more GPU-oriented future in technology (a lot of applications use graphics card acceleration now, and DirectX itself is actually a fundamental part of the Windows SDK rather than a seperate kit as of Windows 8), we will see more of a push towards this kind of approach in future games - dynamically distributing data between the CPU and GPU depending on the scene (whether there is lots of rendering or relatively little, essentially) looks like a good way forward.

Anyway, I'm going off on a tangent now, sorry...