AMD Mantle API [updating]

The problem is on the game developpement side, if GPU makers need adapt so much their drivers to a specific games who should have been developped for working on thoses hardware correctly.. thats a problem. ( without saying, optimisation are not the same for each series of GPU who are supported by this driver ). There will allways been optimisation needed anyway, but you cant adapt the hardware by driver for each games. Maybe a good reason for Mantle to exist, or at least for show the way.. the game "API" is adapted to the hardware and games optimised for the hardware..

Its not directly the fault of the developpers.. they have a lot of pressure uppon them. short developpement time, cost, rentability.

Sorry, i have got a long week, with short sleeping time and my english is really bad today )

 

The initial driver effectively broke OpenGL. It had the wrong files.
It's not a matter of a code bug, it was the completely wrong set of files and not the files Id had worked with AMD to create.

AMD fixed it, then couldn't host it properly.
Then gamers had to decide which driver to install since they couldn't have both that fix and the BF3 changes.

I'm just saying Carmack may be a bit reluctant, given past history.

 

You know as some have mentionned before, Carmack is more on the commercial, marketing side today of what it was on the past.. I believe he want more protect OpenGL than he dont like Mantle idea. ( and he's maybe right to do it )..
He's the number one supporter of OpenGL.. I start to believe, for Carmack, this is Opengl vs Mantle, at least when he try to sell OpenGL ....

If you ask him, what do you think about Mantle ?, he will respond you, we can do the same or even better with OpenGL.
If you ask him, if Mantle is the future, he will respond you.. OpenGL is the future.. If you ask him what he think about x.. he will still respond you, OpenGL is better for do it. He believe in OpenGL, and i can understand it.. i like it too. Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong, but im sure this is what he think.

On the other side, im allways surprised, he absolutely not support OpenCL.. never a word about it.... Somewhere, he's full of contradiction.

 

I believe he has more of a directing or consulting role, I'm not sure if that is a marketing role.

AMD has touted its improved and stronger devrel program, which does tacitly acknowledge the times where it wasn't stronger.
AMD's OpenGL support was not, and is not as good.

Carmack already admits to having much longer history with Nvidia, and Nvidia is regarded better with OpenGL.
The GPU decompression, from my admittedly fuzzy memory, was Nvidia-only at the time because it had hardware features exposed via extensions to the industry-standard API.

Or possibly something a little worse but without all the downsides of Mantle.
AMD's admitting some of that by promising to extend OpenGL with at least some of those functions that cut out some of the biggest overheads.

If there are other undisclosed benefits, which I do hope there are, we'll need to wait for full disclosure.

 

Ofc, i dont compare both ( we have finally so little informations about Mantle yet, technically wise ) ..

But i got the feeling he support mainly OpenGL and he have himself put Mantle against OpenGL when he have been asked about it... ( i dont speak technically ). We can have many worried, question about what can bring Mantle, and expose it..

There's a gaming conference here with developpers, this will occurs really soon, Nielsen and some other developpers of BF4 will be there ( maybe Johan i dont know ). Im really busy with my work, and i have yet absolutely no idea if i could be present.

 

http://ir.amd.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=74093&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1871714&highlight=

Cloud Imperium Games (Star Citizen), Eidos-Montréal (Thief) and Oxide Games (Nitrous game engine) will support Mantle API

 

Well that's interesting. Star Citizen uses the Cryengine, so are they implementing specifically for themselves? Or is Crytek perhaps incorporating into their engine?

Still either way very good news for us AMD users since Nvidia was their primary development platform.

 

Star Citizen features both NVIDIA and AMD features , Mantle and GPU PhysX at the same time !

 

Crytek seems like the company that would be most likely to adopt Mantle (were it not for Johan's direct involvement).

 

Great news.

 

Is there a (bad) history between Repi and Crytek I'm not aware of? Or just competitiveness?

 

No, he's just saying Crytek would be more likely to adopt Mantle than EA, except that repi has been very vocal for a long time about wanting a lower level API on the PC. You can be sure he had a lot to do with Frostbite's wholesale adoption of Mantle.

Being "The Man" behind Frostbite is a very powerful position indeed. We couldn't ask for a better overlord IMO except maybe Humus. Oh Humus, where art thou?

 

With NFS Rivals also out soon, will be interesting to see if we'll see a Mantle version of that as well (also being Frostbite)

 

Don't know what CryEngine's bottlenecks or Crytek's priorities are, but typically they definitely also are pushing graphics heavily on all platforms and would be happy to see them adopt Mantle if they choose to do so. The more high-end developers using Mantle the better. But it is of course something they have to decide on their own and see if it makes sense for them.

 

At least back in the days of Crysis 1, they had serious CPU bottlenecks due to the immense number of draw calls in some scenes. Number of draw calls can be monitored in the in game console and it gets ridiculous at times. In those cases performance scales almost linearly with CPU frequency, number of cores be damned.

I'm sure they've gotten better at reducing the number of draw calls in more recent versions of CryEngine, but methinks something like Mantle could still be of use to them.

 

Excuse for my english and my simplicity's sake, I'm not a programmer but a simple fan....but can i ask you how Mantle can works on an engine that was developed to run with directx? (Now i'm going to try ) is Mantle a middleware or perhaps a set of custom extensions of ogl?

 

It's a separate API. The engine would have a rendering backend written that uses Mantle, just like it would have one for other supported APIs.

 

Ok, but...if the development of the engine is started years ago, how it can have today the support of mantle (if Mantle si a brand new set of Api)?

 

Game engines are modularized, so the non-graphics portion shouldn't need to be touched.
The parts that deal with the actual rendering path will need to be written for the API.

The announcements for Mantle support thus far are either the latest Frostbite--which is the engine that is driving the development of Mantle, or engines that are in-progress or statements from developers that they will code for it in the future.

Barring some kind of shim for some kind of compatibility mode (dunno if possible), existing code cannot use it.

 

Mmmm...very interesting. Thank you very much.