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CES: Mantle API news thread [BF4 up to 45% faster, Star Swarm demo flies on Kaveri]

DieH@rd

Banned
Somebody leaked entire slide gallery from AMD Kaveri APU closed demo, but that imgur album was removed. Only two images have survived.

ckq3adww92re4vlw1.jpg

ckq3b8rq6qbtgzlox.jpg


:) StarSwarm demo is taking full advantage from new API, with up to 10 thousand of starships on screen, and engine that was built from the ground up to do crazy things. This is the perfect example how Mantle will enable game developers to finally start producing PC strategy games with incredible amount of unique on-screen objects. :)
 

Hasney

Member
Nice performance gain, but even though I'm probably going AMD with my next upgrade, I really hope this fails to find wide adoption. I just have this worst case scenario in my head where Nvidia have to respond with their own API because of how adopted Mantle is and it would just lead to this saga where developers have to support Direct3D by default for compatibility, then an OpenGL version if SteamOS gets any traction. But that's not all, then you've got a Mantle codebase in there and/or an Nvidia API one.

I doubt they'd do 4 versions, so it'd probably end up with a situation like the 3DFX V PowerVR days where most games support one or the other. Then you've got a situation where it's not an overall price/performance for the card you want, it's a price/performance for the games you're interested in for each brand of card.
 
So if low level access is that benificial for even pcs, why the hell have we not seen this before?

Oh well, at least we have mantle and gsync in the same year.
 

Jibbed

Member
I'll have to see what kind of support AMD can rally from devs before I'll even consider 'switching sides' so to speak.. 770 4GB will be my next card in a few months regardless.
 

jediyoshi

Member
This'll be interesting.

Replaying through MOH Warfighter and Bad Company 2 lately, it's wild optimization wise how much they got out of BF4. My 270x is ready.
 
Excellent, this should be highly beneficial to AMD if Mantle catches on. I'm not jumping to conclusions yet though, up to 45% does not mean that the difference will be that big constantly. It could be for very specific scenarios.
 

Ikuu

Had his dog run over by Blizzard's CEO
I'll have to see what kind of support AMD can rally from devs before I'll even consider 'switching sides' so to speak.. 770 4GB will be my next card in a few months regardless.

Honestly, unless the performance is impressive, I'd rather have the stuff that Nvidia is working on (G-sync, Shadowplay etc),
 

KKRT00

Member
Dont forget people, those are numbers for Kaveri APU. Im hoping for even better numbers for R9 290/290X GPUs. :)

Its more CPU limited on Kaveri than GPU limited. Performance gains via Mantle will be lower on high end CPUs.
GPU gains wont be as big in BF4.
 

MaxiLive

Member
45% will end up being on low end cards or ones built into CPU. I would be guessing at 10-20% max on higher end GPUS. Which will be 5-10 frames on high settings so I wouldn't be expecting much :p.
 

big_z

Member
Mantle API works for now only on GCN architecture.

That means 7000 series [which is 2 years old] and recently launched R9 series.


it was announced a while back that mantle does not require GCN and works with NVidia cards as well.

this is good news going forward providing the performance gains over directx example isn't a best case scenario.
 

DieH@rd

Banned
So if low level access is that benificial for even pcs, why the hell have we not seen this before?

Oh well, at least we have mantle and gsync in the same year.

We did.

10+ years ago, every GPU manufacturer had its own low-level API. OpenGL was only unifying API, but it was slow and underdeveloped. Then, when developers begged for salvation [each game had to support crapton of APIs], Microsoft came and delivered DX. It was slower, but after few versions it got better [DX6/7 and up].

Now when only 2 big GPU manufacturers are alive, and majority of AAA gaming was moved to consoles where low level APIs never left, developers want to bring fast APIs back to PC. They asked for it, AMD delivered with Mantle.

Hopefully Nvidia will adopt it also. AMD confirmed that Mantle can be adapted for other modern GPU ahitectures from their competition. Mantle is not coding to the metal, it is still using slim abstraction layer for talking with brand new small GPU driver.
 

Hasney

Member
it was announced a while back that mantle does not require GCN and works with NVidia cards as well.

this is good news going forward providing the performance gains over directx example isn't a best case scenario.

Doesn't require, but the card needs to have support for the API and no NVidia card announced/released or older AMD cards will have that. The card would specifically have to be made with Mantle in mind to support the calls as any type of wrapper in the drivers would lose the efficiency gain using hardware that directly supports Mantle.
 
it was announced a while back that mantle does not require GCN and works with NVidia cards as well.

this is good news going forward providing the performance gains over directx example isn't a best case scenario.
It could work with Nvidia cards, only if they implement it.

Dont forget people, those are numbers for Kaveri APU. Im hoping for even better numbers for R9 290/290X GPUs. :)

The performance gains would depend more on the CPU used.
 

Hasney

Member
Mantle is Windows only for the foreseeable future.

They're working on Linux support. One of the slides in November at the APU13 summit conference said "Mantle + SteamOS = powerful combination!"

I was under the impression it was platform-agnostic.

AMD have said it's portable, going so far as to say they could even get it working on Android, but it still needs to be ported.
 
Mantle is Windows only for the foreseeable future.


Is it? A developer friend said that EA announcing they were supporting it with frostbite which the use for fucking everything now was the biggest third party news this gen in favor of the ps4 that no one paid attention to...

I need to ask further details I guess.
 
I think this is pretty funny considering how many PC gamers around here laugh at the notion of "low overhead" and "coding to the metal" in console vs pc development.
 

pswii60

Member
It's like 3Dfx and Glide all over again. I remember there being a phenomenal difference between Glide and DirectX/OpenGL back then.
 
Its more CPU limited on Kaveri than GPU limited. Performance gains via Mantle will be lower on high end CPUs.
GPU gains wont be as big in BF4.

Pretty much this.
If you have an I7 or High end AMD cpu im pretty sure the gpu is still your fps bottleneck.
 

Morph-0

Member
Honestly, unless the performance is impressive, I'd rather have the stuff that Nvidia is working on (G-sync, Shadowplay etc),

Fixed fps in sync are always better than fluctuating. I'd rather buy a more powerful card than a Gsync capable card + monitor. Gsync setups will work out far more expensive.
 
I think this is pretty funny considering how many PC gamers around here laugh at the notion of "low overhead" and "coding to the metal" in console vs pc development.

Let's see some actual numbers first. "Up to 45%" is much closer to my own estimations of 25-30% than to those of the people who expect magical 2-3x increases in performance.
 

AJLma

Member
Pretty much this.
If you have an I7 or High end AMD cpu im pretty sure the gpu is still your fps bottleneck.

If that were the case I don't think these developers would be showing off their demo on an FX-8350 and R9 290X. Everything we know so far points to Mantle's goal being a performance boost across all of AMD's GCN GPUs.
 

DieH@rd

Banned
The performance gains would depend more on the CPU used.

Nope Mantle is taking full advantage from CPU scaling, and is completely dependant on GPU speed.

DX games are CPU limited, Mantle games are GPU limmited. FX8350 downclocked to 2GHz introduces zero framerate loss to StarSwarm demo.

Oxide Games devs have said that people with midrange CPUs will have no bottlenecks.
 

Morph-0

Member
Why didn't Microsoft do this? They could have redesigned / rewritten directX so that it works like Mantle does.
 
It's like 3Dfx and Glide all over again. I remember there being a phenomenal difference between Glide and DirectX/OpenGL back then.

To be fair, the majority difference between glide and directX at the time was the fact that glide had less features (no AA, 16-bit color with dithering only, etc). Glide was as barebones as possible.
 

Hasney

Member
Why didn't Microsoft do this? They could have redesigned / rewritten directX so that it works like Mantle does.

No, they couldn't. Mantle works like it does as it targets specific hardware. If MS did that, then Direct3D wouldn't have support for a lot of cards, which was the whole point of D3D.

Not saying that D3D couldn't do with an overhaul, but it couldn't and shouldn't work in the same way as Mantle.
 

chaosblade

Unconfirmed Member
Even "up to" 45% is way, way better than I expected Mantle would ever do. I figured best case scenarios would be 10-12%, with 3-5% on average.

Color me surprised.
 

HariKari

Member
So AMD built a demo solely for the purpose of showing off Mantle's strengths (lots of objects) and then we're shocked at the result? This isn't going to magically boost Battlefield 4 45%. It may come into play in the future, but it's one of those "will multiplats ever bother?" type things.
 
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