AMD Mantle API [updating]

pretending people play BF4 for single player is "disingenuous"........................

 

Yes, testing worse case scenarios is clearly a misleading representation of what someone would actually experience

Any site that still presents results solely in average fps bars is not worth reading.

 

Quickly tested on HD7970 + A10 5800K and the stutter issue is gone
This update should make a lot of people happier!

 

As long there are no updated drivers from AMD, which won't destroy anything else (dx), no Mantle for me.

And, it's now 3 months ago beta V9.4 introduced stuttering and sound distortion with v-sync and it still isn't fixed

 

Mantle driver is messing up dx, how so ?

 

Dunno, works fine here (HD7970)

 

Only AMD knows, hopefully, allthough my guess is it should have something to do with crossfire and R9 290(X)'s.
Also the readme stated CF, for at least dx9, is disabled for this set. So there is something gooing on which affects dx (CF)behavior deeply with this set.

 

I use Tridef 3D drivers for the Oculus Rift, and when I had 14.1 beta installed, launching Dx games in Tridef would result in a "this game does not support dx 9, 10, 11" or something error. I went back to to 13.12 beta because I hardly play BF4 anyway.

Edit: this is with a R9 -290 on Win7 64bit.

 

The stuttering is still present with the latest patch when using the Kaveri IGP, according to Techreport:
http://techreport.com/review/26042/a-quick-look-at-mantle-on-amd-kaveri-apu

 

Although they report that overall the experience is smoother with Mantle...

 

Since the article is from the same day as the update, I doubt they used it for the testing (or at least I didn't see any mention of it there).

 

Page 3:

I assume that is the latest patch they are referring to. Was there an earlier BF4 patch which also claimed such fixes?

Edit:
The article's author states in the comments.

 

Oh ok. I didn't read the last page - only the intro and results where he said that he took a couple of days for testing and when you add the writing of the article itself, I figured it wasn't with the latest patch (also up to that point it wasn't mentioned so.. ).

 

Well one has to wonder who is the culprit here, if there are any.
Scaling the numbers of cores is not the most efficient approach as it scales well with few workloads.
On top of it I would say not all the architectures scales the same, aka Intel does better usually here as it does wrt to per core performances.
Last layer is drivers, Nvidia does a better job than AMD at spreading the load on multiple cores.

The sad issue is that is not because of devs that Intel cpu fare better, there are other issues but at the cores Intel CPU are just so much better at this point. Late Core i3 (which is seen as four cores from the software by the way) simply beats last AMD quad core (streamrollers) to the pulp in a massive majority of cases.

 

Spoiler

Spoiler

Strange the rendering bug fix isn't in the update:

Otherwise it's running great now - then it's just all the missing utilities (game recorders, radeonpro etc)
I also upgraded to a 4gb card at the same time, seemed like the at least the old version didn't took care of 2gb cards (had like 2-2.2 vram usage - now it's around 2.3 out of 4).

 

After update my R9 290X CF is not crashing and works well, but still game stutters if vSync is enabled.

I hope they fix vSync issues as I don't like playing without it

 

My stuttering is gone now, getting around 80-120 fps Ultra (MSAA disabled) even in 64-man conquest. Using a i5-3570k and 7970Ghz both OCed.

 

You should be able to crank the MSAA with a 7970. Even my 7950 could do it no problem before Mantle.

 

Yes, we need improvements for both styles of rendering. Most developers aren't going to move their whole rendering pipelines to GPU anytime soon. Less CPU overhead is always a good thing. Once the CPU bottlenecks are reduced, the GPU side bottlenecks of massive draw calls will become visible in wider range of games, and the hardware manufacturers will improve their designs. This will benefit both camps in the long run.

Still I must say that I am personally much more interested in features such as asynchronous compute, improved multi-draw functionality and bindless resources. Because you can sidestep the need for multiple independent (state changing) draw calls easily by good engine design, and thus sidestep the CPU draw call cost completely. OpenGL 4.4 was a HUGE step in right direction (ARB_indirect_parameters + ARB_multi_draw_indirect + ARB bindless resources + ARB sparse resources). It still lacks proper asynchronous compute however (multiple command queues with priorities/fences/ect). It's quite unfortunate that the recent GPUs (from AMD/Nvidia/Intel) have so many good features that are not yet exposed by common graphics APIs yet. Hopefully Mantle pushes the big players to the right direction and we eventually get a good cross vendor API that supports all the modern GPU features.

 

New expans.....DLC..can i say mantle-wow



I like to hear the story behind this test...