AMD Mantle API [updating]

Maybe DICE just wanted their customers to enjoy the other BF4 changes over the weekend.

Given that DICE is the most important game developer pushing Mantle... it would be on their interest to better match the driver release as well? Unless...
 
Yes, but what bad could possibly come out of delaying it 1 or 2 days, so AMD could iron out the driver?

EA/DICE, and their paid staff and non-free resources have other things to do than sit on their asses waiting for AMD to possibly blow away another date.

These aren't monolithic entities, so let's figure multiple groups and departments, with at least some of the coordination effort and ancilliary buildup lost every time they have to restart.
To add that the only known deadline that can be counted on at this point is the one AMD blew, and that means messing with planning or projects that should have gone through the pipeline if the launch had gone appropriately.
This hurts the launch effort, and anything else that it robs resources from.

This is a rather minor problem, but it has costs and EA isn't oblidged to incur more of them because AMD wants a redo.

There were far worse examples of lapses in AMD's past, from things like its channel inventory mismanagement, promised volumes at Globalfoundries, and product delays that cost partners millions (see various delays with Opterons from K10 to BD that nailed Cray), but with large organizations and complex projects done for the sake of revenue, the least that can happen is AMD's screwups costing you money.
 
I ran the Starswarm demo on my 3770K + GTX670 rig. On Extreme and High settings it is simply a slideshow when lots of units are on the screen. I assume Mantle will tremendously benefit this engine.
 
Given that DICE is the most important game developer pushing Mantle... it would be on their interest to better match the driver release as well? Unless...

It's in DICE's best interest to launch their patch when its ready. How does making the patch come out later help anyone? Delay the patch so it launches at the same time as the driver and make everyone who doesn't give a damn about mantle (certainly a significant majority) wait for the other features? Now that would have been a stupid decision.
 
Ok I may have gotten a little confused about this. CPU timings here refer to the period each frame spends in the CPU or what exactly?
The CPU times are the same things FRAPS measures as frame times (and converts to FPS) and sites like techreport.com use in their analysis. This is exactly the right thing to be measuring and great to have it built into the engine now since obviously FRAPS won't work with the Mantle path.
 
Mantle is a curse, and a grindstone around the neck of PC gaming. By fragmenting the userbase and sucking up development time and money the mantle path unjustly enrichens the experience for a few at the expense of the many. Fuck that.

Same goes for nvidia physx, and creative's proprietary sound in the past. Difference is, physx only ever made sense for games that leveraged physics to any greater extent, while mantle has the potential for much broader reach.

PC gaming has prospered under unified 3D APIs. I don't want to see that ending, it can only lead to bad in the end.
 
Mantle is a curse, and a grindstone around the neck of PC gaming. By fragmenting the userbase and sucking up development time and money the mantle path unjustly enrichens the experience for a few at the expense of the many. Fuck that.

And an ideology of class conflict has been a grindstone around the neck of humanity.

What the hell is it doing here in a discussion about 3d gaming?

"unjustly enrichens the experience for a few at the expense of the many"

:vomit:
 
INow we see movements for DX12,

Do you have a source for this? Great news if so and I'd say it's a clear Mantle influence. As an Nvidia gamer (at present) I think Mantle's an awesome development and whether it's through Mantle itself becoming cross vendor, Nvidia pushing it's own proprietary solutions like Gameworks to compete or Microsoft releasing a far more efficient DX12, I think ultimately all PC gamers will benefit.
 
I ran the Starswarm demo on my 3770K + GTX670 rig. On Extreme and High settings it is simply a slideshow when lots of units are on the screen. I assume Mantle will tremendously benefit this engine.

First and foremost, I consider the StarSwarm (Press)Benchmark a showcase as to what Mantle is able to achieve, if you have just too much drawcalls. That said, I think that doing temporal AA through CPU-initiated drawcalls, thus increasing them five-fold, when you're already at a high batch count due to the number of objects on screen, a less than optimal approach (wouldn't instancing work just as well?). Turning off Temporal AA will restore at least two-digit framerates in the most extreme situations I've observed so far (300k batches).

In that regard (and that regard only), it is a bit like Physx benchmarks, where you're deliberately flooding the CPU with objects/particles and not optimizing it the way a sensible developer would, having identified this bottleneck.
 
Mantle is a curse, and a grindstone around the neck of PC gaming. By fragmenting the userbase and sucking up development time and money the mantle path unjustly enrichens the experience for a few at the expense of the many. Fuck that.

Same goes for nvidia physx, and creative's proprietary sound in the past. Difference is, physx only ever made sense for games that leveraged physics to any greater extent, while mantle has the potential for much broader reach.

PC gaming has prospered under unified 3D APIs. I don't want to see that ending, it can only lead to bad in the end.
I mostly saw a standstill over the last few years with some of the more critically acclaimed games being developed on technically retarded last-gen consoles.

Generally, a unified API is a good thing as long as it does not lead to diminishing progress when game developers (or rather their publishers) cut short the research and development budget, making programmers make do with exisiting stuff. If that (due to commercial interest) inevitable state has been reached, a new impulse is direly needed.
 
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_mantle_preview,1.html

Update:
To get some tastebuds going here are some results with a Kaveri processor:
Battlefield 4 Medium Quality 720P 1080P
AMD A10 7850K (IGP) DX11 50 28
AMD A10 7850K (IGP) Mantle 57 31
AMD A10 7850K (R9-290X) DX11 102 102
AMD A10 7850K (R9-290X) Mantle 162 160
Battlefield 4 Ultra Quality DX11 720P 1080P
AMD A10 7850K (IGP) DX11 20 10
AMD A10 7850K (IGP) Mantle 21 10
AMD A10 7850K (R9-290X) DX11 90 78
AMD A10 7850K (R9-290X) Mantle 150 86

That definitely shows that in CPU bound situation, Mantle really helps out killing off CPU overhead. The next phase will be installing Mantle on a setup with a fast Core i7 processor.


http://www.guru3d.com/news_story/amd_mantle_update_driver_released_to_press.html
 
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_mantle_preview,1.html


That definitely shows that in CPU bound situation, Mantle really helps out killing off CPU overhead. The next phase will be installing Mantle on a setup with a fast Core i7 processor.

Nice! :D

Concluding

This is an extremely short article as there is just so much to explore with mantle. It will remains to bee very simple though. On high-end PCs with a single graphics card you may see perf increase in the 10% area. On massively CPU limited situations like low/medium quality settings / low resolutions or even Multi-GPU setup, that's where the gain easily can get 30 even 40%. As such Mantle will benefit low-end and mainstream processor based PCs the most. But even at Enthusiast class, it will make a difference.
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_mantle_preview,2.html
 
Q: Does Mantle compete with DirectX?
A: DirectX provides a standardized programming interface for GPUs, allowing the same code to work across a wide range of architectures and product configurations. Mantle complements DirectX® by providing a lower level of hardware abstraction for developers who want and need it, echoing the capabilities they have come to expect on dedicated game consoles.

This is an interesting answer.
 
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