A standard HSLS should work, but GameWorks is a "checkbox". The devs don't have the source code. Maybe they will use HDAO for Mantle.
AMD Mantle API [updating]
- Thread starter MarkoIt
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HBAO has been described enough in the original paper and follow-up tech reports for someone to implement it themselves. In fact, haven't folks already done this? The GameWorks implementation would just be for convenience; it's hardly required.
Furthermore, there are reasonable alternatives if someone doesn't want to implement it for some reason.
Furthermore, there are reasonable alternatives if someone doesn't want to implement it for some reason.
NVIDIA at least makes a clear distinction between HBAO and HBAO+
Yeah but they describe HBAO+ a fair bit (interleaved rendering+IIRC some temporal reprojection)... it's not hard to understand what's going on.
And like I said, ultimately it doesn't matter if it's "exactly the same pixel output as HBAO+ by NVIDIA"... the general principals are not a secret so implementing something similar from scratch is totally doable if desired.
http://www.firaxis.com/?/S=5845faee...eb5f6cb11/blog/single/why-we-went-with-mantle
Firaxis on Mantle, some picks:
Firaxis on Mantle, some picks:
FYI - from (another) dev's point of view:
http://www.oxidegames.com/2014/05/21/next-generation-graphics-apis/
http://www.oxidegames.com/2014/05/21/next-generation-graphics-apis/
I do chuckle a bit at these sorts of claims (they are not uncommon). Developers have all the documentation that they need to write their own driver/interface for Intel and AMD hardware for a while now. Hell they even have a big head start from the open source Mesa stuff. But yet they don't... because realistically the claim based on the silly notion that game developers are rock-stars and driver folks have no idea what they're doing. Just for various reasons game devs are allowed to be mouthy about driver issues but driver guys have to silently fix 90% of broken games and get blamed for the other buggy 10% that they don't yet have workarounds for. Note that I am neither a driver developer nor a game developer, but I get to see both sides regularly.Dan said:
Sometimes I do wish that someone would go ahead and write a path that directly targets (each version of) Intel and AMD hardware interfaces. I want to see how well that goes for users when they get a new piece of hardware and can't run the game (or run it slower) because the developers haven't written a path for it yet/ever. That said, I don't think it's actually worth ruining a game just to satisfy my small desire to see the practical reality of this play out
/rant
I'll also note that while I have a lot of respect for Dan, I don't agree with his view of how D3D12 was developed (i.e. what Dave quoted). As several IHVs and Microsoft have all stated, we've all been working on this stuff for a long while and similarities in design to Mantle are more due to GPU hardware design realities than anything else. Once you're beyond those broad strokes (i.e. GPUs have page tables and mostly read their state from memory these days) Mantle and D3D12 are *not* the same. I think it's also fair to say that D3D12 and Mantle both take the majority of their learnings from console APIs rather than coming out of the blue. Obviously a lot of the same sources were giving feedback to both Microsoft and AMD which also contributes to the similarities but fundamentally it's really hardware/physics stuff at work here.
But whatever, most of the history here is mostly irrelevant... the point is there will be a fast path for all modern GPUs on Windows. If you're somehow still driver limited in D3D12, you're almost certainly doing something stupid. I see no reason that AMD wouldn't be able to write a D3D12 driver that is as efficient as (or more) their Mantle driver, but time will tell.
You're missing the point. Just having the docs for a particular chip is not sufficient, and not what we've been asking for. Yes, we have the ability to write our own drivers for specific parts, but we don't have the bandwidth to maintain those drivers for every new part. We also don't have the ability to deliver new drivers on the day the hardware ships, and we don't have the ability to walk down the hall and talk to the hardware people when we run into undocumented quirks.
What is needed is something that is like x86 in that it is low level, and like DX/OGL, in that it is well-defined and forward compatible. If an IHV published an IHV-specific command protocol, built the necessary hooks into the major OSes, and committed to supporting it across future hardware generations, would they get support? We know they would, because Mantle already has.
I'm a big fan of Mantle but so far support seems to have been dissapointingly poor.
Welcome Josh, nice to have you contribute here
For reference, I was responding specifically to Dan's quote about wanting "no API"... you already have that. In reality, you really do want an API of some form, you just want it to solve all of the above problems while introducing zero overhead. And I'd love if games ran at infinite speed too, but I'll settle for 60 Hz for now and maybe 120 once I get my Oculus dev kit
, although it had a separate vector instruction set of course).
Thus you really have two options... either slow down/stop the pace of GPU innovation in the name of hardware interface convergence or continue to have a translation layer, even if it's fairly thin.
And the whole forward compatibility issue is a bigger one than you might think. The proof is in the pudding there and won't be known for several years at least... but do you really think we're not going to run into the same issues of today's "low-level" APIs mapping poorly to GPUs 10+ years from now that we have today? The further "forward" you want the API to be compatible the more problematic it becomes in general, and PC gamers expect a huge tail given what DX/GL have been able to provide to this point.
No, that is exactly my point. In the same paragraph people claim that that don't have the resources to do all these things but then implicitly dismiss them as easy problems and complain about poor driver engineering when there are bugs (even if they are in application code...). Turns out GPU hardware interfaces and designs aren't as stable as CPUs...
For reference, I was responding specifically to Dan's quote about wanting "no API"... you already have that. In reality, you really do want an API of some form, you just want it to solve all of the above problems while introducing zero overhead. And I'd love if games ran at infinite speed too, but I'll settle for 60 Hz for now and maybe 120 once I get my Oculus dev kit
So along with that are you willing to give up on any new features for 5 years? Are you willing to pay a cost for basically putting a driver in hardware? I'm not sure how much you know about x86 decoders but I don't imagine you want to slap one of those on the front of every execution unit on a GPU (RIP Larrabee
, although it had a separate vector instruction set of course).Thus you really have two options... either slow down/stop the pace of GPU innovation in the name of hardware interface convergence or continue to have a translation layer, even if it's fairly thin.
There is nothing exciting or high overhead about the hardware command protocol itself. I see no reason to go lower level than what Mantle and D3D12 already do - they have already hit the major problematic driver points for modern GPUs.
And the whole forward compatibility issue is a bigger one than you might think. The proof is in the pudding there and won't be known for several years at least... but do you really think we're not going to run into the same issues of today's "low-level" APIs mapping poorly to GPUs 10+ years from now that we have today? The further "forward" you want the API to be compatible the more problematic it becomes in general, and PC gamers expect a huge tail given what DX/GL have been able to provide to this point.
Compared to what?
DavidGraham
Veteran
They could start by writing a decent DX11 driver first. In the StarSwarm benchmark (oxide's own engine), NVIDIA cards wipe the floor with AMD cards in DX11 path, while also giving the Mantle path a run for it's money.
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The number of games released and announced since its introduction, DX11, the number of fingers on my hands...
I had an argument with someone in another forum recently about how awesome Mantle (and low level PC API's in general) are and his counter argument was that its their impact on PC gaming as a whole is virtually nil. And with only two games and a tech demo currently supporting it and no other big game announcements that I'm aware of (engines don't count unless we also have word of games running on those engines that support the API) it was certainly a difficult argument to defend against. Perhaps there are some huge UE4 and CryEngine announcements just around the corner that your dying to tell us about - I truly hope there are, but right now all I see are big game announcements and launches (wolf, witcher 2, watch dogs, batman, ac unity etc...) and not a hint of Mantle support despite some of those games having huge CPU requirements and thus being perfect Mantle candidates.
We want more Dave, please make it happen
pjb, most developers didn't even know about Mantle before you did and it takes time to make games. Plus AMD was limiting the number of developers with access to Mantle as it wasn't close to being out of beta when it was announced.
If it hadn't been announced so early you wouldn't think the adoption is slow. I guess that's the double edged sword of doing a marketing push for something that wasn't ready for consumers yet.
If it hadn't been announced so early you wouldn't think the adoption is slow. I guess that's the double edged sword of doing a marketing push for something that wasn't ready for consumers yet.
The "most general"?
I guess for instance the fact that mantle/gcn only have 2 types of buffers; memory (linary mapped) and images (shuffled for better spatial cache coherence), while at least dx11 has all different kinds; structured, append, vertex, index, etc which you can't alias (for instance a compute shader can't write to an index buffer), and I guess dx12 will need at least some of them to support all the wanted hardware.
Cryengine was announced at gdc.
Welcome Josh, nice to have you contribute here
In reality, you really do want an API of some form, you just want it to solve all of the above problems while introducing zero overhead.
So along with that are you willing to give up on any new features for 5 years? Are you willing to pay a cost for basically putting a driver in hardware? I'm not sure how much you know about x86 decoders but I don't imagine you want to slap one of those on the front of every execution unit on a GPU (RIP Larrabee
Thus you really have two options... either slow down/stop the pace of GPU innovation in the name of hardware interface convergence or continue to have a translation layer, even if it's fairly thin.
We're probably always going to need an API of some kind, in order to allow the shader ISAs to evolve, and eventually to translate commands. But the API can be a lot leaner and closer to the hardware than it is today. A standardized command format would do the trick. This is what I mean by 'like x86' Not in the sense that its burned into hardware, but in the sense the the instruction stream is forward compatible.
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