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The Next Generation of Graphics APIs

Thanks for having an awesome forum. :) I shall continue to lurk!

For now, it's the start of a long weekend here in the States, and it's high time I get some tacos.
 
Thracks said:
HARHAR. This is what I get for typing quickly. He's not referring to VLIW4 vs. GCN. Get my drift?
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Honestly? No, not entirely. I get that he was probably talking about Nvidia and Intel (probably to a lesser degree). This leads me onto the question of why the 6970 is incapable of running Mantle? Is it that the hardware is not powerful enough (surely this shouldn't be a factor with an API?) or is it that the architecture isn't really compatible?
If the later, how do we know that Nvidia and Intel hardware architecture IS compatible?
Or is there a 3rd possibility that I've missed as to why 6970 can't run Mantle?

Thracks said:
It'll be open to any developer who--like Firaxis, EA and Oxide (to name a few)--are comfortable supporting multiple render backends. Game developers have been doing this for a very long time: Quake 2 supported PowerVR and OpenGL. Unreal Tournament supported OpenGL, D3D and Glide. Half-Life 2 supports OpenGL and D3D. Civilization: Beyond Earth will support Direct3D and Mantle. As Josh stated, the manhour cost of this decision is fixed and known, and many game developers are willing to pay that cost for less headaches down the road.

If you're a game developer concerned with giving the best experience to every gamer, then choosing Mantle for 40% of the market is a no-brainer. In the past few days, two noteworthy game developers have even expressed how and why DirectX 12 and Mantle should coexist, and why they will use both.
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But OpenGL has been around for a while and is relatively unsupported and didn't PowerVR die out?
When you say less headaches down the road, what do you mean? Surely they'll have to support DirectX as well as Mantle and so won't have any less headaches than just supporting DirectX. Unless Mantle is perfect it would suggest they'll have 'some' more.

It will be interesting to see the differences between Mantle and DirectX 12. Until we see how much Mantle does better and how much better it does them it'll be hard to know how much we need/want it. Not that that will stop this forum debating it way before we know any actual information about either of them!

Also interesting to see that 2 developers have apparently already gotten onboard with DirectX 12. Since we get a new thread every time a Developer mentions the word "Mantle" I'm sure we'll soon see some threads announcing developers that will be using DirectX 12. Interesting to see if as many developers sign up to the evil Microsoft API as the API they've 'been asking for all along'.
 
GoogalyMoogaly said:
Also interesting to see that 2 developers have apparently already gotten onboard with DirectX 12. Since we get a new thread every time a Developer mentions the word "Mantle" I'm sure we'll soon see some threads announcing developers that will be using DirectX 12. Interesting to see if as many developers sign up to the evil Microsoft API as the API they've 'been asking for all along'.
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money hats
 
Thanks thracks for coming and clearing up some issues.
The HD 6970 uses a VLIW4 architecture, which is quite dissimilar from the basic architecture of Graphics Core Next. Mantle support does not exist for VLIW4 because the underlying hardware is frankly incapable of running it.
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Just one question doesnt this sort of Conflict with the fact mantle is quite capable(but less optimized ofc) of working on other Non GCN cards i mean Other vender and older cards ?
 
For god sakes, enough of the 69 series support already!!!

Who out of the 25 posters in this thread is using one???



Thanks thracks for educating the the non believers, and a very special additional thanks for clearing up the confusion of who's to answer for Kap's Mantle predicament-Matt's been pulling his hair out explaining for I don't know how long now.
 
Great thread, great read, thought initially it was going the 'usual' way but Thracks turned it around. I do wish we could get rid of the Amd V Nvidia stuff and just debate how great things are now looking for Pc gaming with DX12 AND Mantle. It now looks like Nvidia card owners could benefit from mantle, IF Nvidia allow it and I do hope that is what happens. Lot of good info here put over simply for noobs like me. Great stuff guys. :D
 
triss said:
Thanks thracks for coming and clearing up some issues.

Just one question doesnt this sort of Conflict with the fact mantle is quite capable(but less optimized ofc) of working on other Non GCN cards i mean Other vender and older cards ?
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One more comment:

Graphics chips are more programmable now than ever. What we could consider "full" compute and programmability (e.g. unified memory, SIMD, multi-way vector processing, dynamic scheduling, thread-level parallelism, compiler "independence") are not found on older DX11 µarches like the 6000 Series TeraScale. These shortcomings make VLIW a poor or unworkable fit for expanding hardware capabilities through new languages or APIs like Mantle. Mantle is not compatible with HD 6000 for this reason: the architecture is not programmable enough.

But Mantle would be compatible with architectures that function like GCN. As Dan Baker noted in his blog: GCN is one of the most generally programmable architectures out there. We're very proud of that, and Mantle makes good use of it.

//edit: As an aside, I'm surprised to learn that there are so many people uncertain about why Mantle is not supported on HD 6000 Series GPUs. Anandtech has a really great and approachable article that elaborates on many of the significant changes that are a hallmark of GCN vs. past AMD architectures. I strongly suggest everyone angling at the HD 6000+Mantle narrative take a look--a lot to learn.
 
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I have one in my parents rig and one in my brothers or isnt that good enough to be allowed questions?
I also wasn't aware owning a Specific GPU was a requirement for asking questions I'm sure if it is you will oblige by not posting in threads in which your current hardware isnt specifically mentioned?
I also thanked him for the info i only asked about one point that was relevant to me

Thanks thracks for the 69series reason :)
 
tommybhoy said:
For god sakes, enough of the 69 series support already!!!

Who out of the 25 posters in this thread is using one???



Thanks thracks for educating the the non believers, and a very special additional thanks for clearing up the confusion of who's to answer for Kap's Mantle predicament-Matt's been pulling his hair out explaining for I don't know how long now.
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In fairness I don't think the posters of this thread or this forum in general really represent PC Gaming users or their hardware that well. I'm sure there are a lot of people still using 6900 series or older hardware.
Besides which I think some of the concern is if it can't support older AMD hardware how do we know it can support Nvidia hardware at all?

While I agree that it was nice for Thracks to contribute, other than learning that older AMD cards can't support Mantle, did we learn anything new?

rolypolyman said:
Great thread, great read, thought initially it was going the 'usual' way but Thracks turned it around. I do wish we could get rid of the Amd V Nvidia stuff and just debate how great things are now looking for Pc gaming with DX12 AND Mantle. It now looks like Nvidia card owners could benefit from mantle, IF Nvidia allow it and I do hope that is what happens. Lot of good info here put over simply for noobs like me. Great stuff guys. :D
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What do you mean "It now looks like", this isn't new information is it? Hasn't this been discussed multiple times over the past months? The argument has always been "why would Nvidia want to adopt an AMD controlled tech?" and then after DX12 was announced (that's how old the notion of Nvidia possibly being able to use it in the future is) it was questioned even more if there's any reason for Nvidia to get behind Mantle when they could get behind DirectX 12 instead (an API not controlled by their biggest rivals).
 
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Parents and brothers are also mantle excluded? wow my bad didnt realise
:(
Well unless new stuff comes up i think most my questions have been sorted thanks to thracks atm Thanks again
 
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triss said:
Parents and brothers are also mantle excluded? wow my bad didnt realise
:(
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Do you want technology to move on or support the old and be held back. Mantle's starting point is the new gen of compute cards and the future. I won't be getting mantle support and i am not bothered. I want things to move on and give me a real reason to upgrade what i have. Whats funny though is if i upgraded my Gpu mantle would give my CPU even more life so it's not all bad.
 
It's a difficult one really: would AMD want to support older cards even if they could (assuming they're telling the truth)? Doesn't make much sense to financially.

I don't see the problem personally with their support range but that's just me. I always have a newish GPU :p.
 
TheRealDeal said:
Do you want technology to move on or support the old and be held back. Mantle's starting point is the new gen of compute cards and the future. I won't be getting mantle support and i am not bothered. I want things to move on and give me a real reason to upgrade what i have. Whats funny though is if i upgraded my Gpu mantle would give my CPU even more life so it's not all bad.
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My comment was nothing to do with mantle it was to do with the fact it was said there not allowed to have a interest in mantle as implied by a poster

On the basis of what thracks was kind enough to say i'll be working on getting them to upgrade gpu :)
 
triss said:
My comment was nothing to do with mantle it was to do with the fact it was said there not allowed to have a interest in mantle as implied by a poster

On the basis of what thracks was kind enough to say i'll be working on getting them to upgrade gpu :)
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It's all good now you have real reason's for them to upgrade. A couple of r9 295s in each machine due to mantle. Sounds good to me :D
 
Taking it out of context or putting words in my mouth triss, I said my parents weren't interested, whatever, I'm sure if your relatives were interested to the point we are, they would be posting here too.
 
haha lol no,, i'd be very interested in the new 280x replacement though if its out this year, otherwise it might well be 290's for them :)
 
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