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

Perkel

Banned
Seriously guys put those "can of worms" somewhere else. This is no 95.

First we have two common APIs. Meaning every hardware needs to support one or another.
Secondly there are only two players on GPU market Nvdia and AMD/Ati.
This is beside advancements in computer programming, libaries, drivers and so much more stuff which is important.


At worst case scenario there will be 4 APIs. Two general type OpenGL and DX known by anyone and supported by every hardware vendor.. and Nvidia API and AMD API.

Most of things will be shared like techniques difference will be only in details and finalization.

It doesn't mean that tesselation tech on Nvidia API will be so different that devs will need to learn again that stuff on AMD API and so on.

Multiplatform engine will probably work with those APIs out of the box.

Again this is no 95....
 
G-sync floored me the moment it was announced.

I'm excited about the idea behind G-sync but the truth is it will have no bearing on my next GPU purchase. Why? Because I do 95% of my gaming on a large-screen HDTV. Maybe one day G-sync (or some equivalent) will be supported on normal, consumer-grade large screen televisions but I'm guessing that will be at least two GPU cycles away and there's no way I'm going back to sitting in front of a 23-27" monitor.

As for Mantle, it has a much greater chance of impacting me personally, though I share the doubts of many here that it will never be adopted by Nvidia and will never reach any kind of critical mass with devs. I'm not sure it should impact my GPU decision either.
 
It's just BF4, a normal FPS. Those are gpu bound, normally. The real gains are in cpu-bound games. RTS like Oxide engine shows, or games like Arma 3. Really, Arma 3 (And dayz!) needs this shit. A 300km2 terrain with several thousands objects on screen (each tree, each bush, each fence, each house and wall and lamp post) with 5kms of draw distance and a one or two hundreds AI units running consumes ALL THE CPU, so the reduced cpu overhead in the render would help A LOT.
BF4 is actually really CPU bound on large servers. Like more than ArmA 3 (without going crazy with sandboxes and custom missions), more than GTA IV.
 

Osiris

I permanently banned my 6 year old daughter from using the PS4 for mistakenly sending grief reports as it's too hard to watch or talk to her
Interesting. Did any of those besides Glide have any actual developer support?

Yes, the few titles I remember most was Unreal Tournament having S3 support, a racing game called Ulim@te Race which absolutely performed best on PowerVR's hardware and seminal racing simulator Grand Prix Legends having Rendition support.

It was a mess, later it came down to Glide or OpenGL (With DirectX still playing catch-up and dismissed by most) but until those two took the fight to each other and killed the competition it was a real crapshoot as to what a game release was going to be like on your card. We're not talking about better/worse on one card or another at the time either, we were talking playable or totally unplayable too.
 

coughlanio

Member
I'm day one for a 7850K, really looking forward to see the performance boost I get.

My A4-4000 has been nothing but impressive - as in Skyrim @ Medium/1080p30.
 

s_mirage

Member
Interesting. Did any of those besides Glide have any actual developer support?

RRedline, PowerSGL, and Metal certainly had some IIRC (I'm certain RRedline did as I had a Verite card back in the day). The support was quite limited though and soon waned when the Voodoo emerged as the dominant card of the time. IIRC Unreal could support Glide, Metal, or PowerSGL (although perhaps not at launch, I can't remember).

YIt was a mess, later it came down to Glide or OpenGL (With DirectX still playing catch-up and dismissed by most) but until those two took the fight to each other and killed the competition it was a real crapshoot as to what a game release was going to be like on your card. We're not talking about better/worse on one card or another at the time either, we were talking playable or totally unplayable too.

Oh yes, I remember those days well. What didn't help is that during the Voodoo's early period of dominance even some Direct3D games were written to work well on it and only it, leaving you SOL if you had non 3dfx hardware.
 

wizzbang

Banned
Nah, it doesn't have to be any obvious "cheating". If you carefully design the testing scenario and select the right CPU for the comparison I can totally see 45% (or more!) happening. The real question is how much of that remains in a normal game scenario (and, for most of us, with a fast Intel CPU).

I've been working on PC's since my first 286. Every few years there's always talk of some new thing which will revoloutionise things, it's exceedingly rare anything does. One of the few exceptions I can think of is the change to using 3D cards over regular 2D video and SSD's - both of these requiring hardware.
From a software perspective, finding a bonus 45% is marketing cockery. 10%? 20% maybe but developers will not be impressed having to work on another renderer again, this isn't glide days.
 

flying dutchman

Neo Member
How can this be? I distinctly remember reading on GAF that the next gen consoles would have very little increase in performance by having an API thats closer to the metal than a PC. I was told Carmack was wrong and or either taken out of context. But now a better API comes out for PC offering massive performance spike and there is joy and happyness from the same people who told me it was a bunch of BS.
 

Cmerrill

You don't need to be empathetic towards me.
Shit, maybe I should have bought a new AMD GPU instead of my GTX-770 for my first gaming rig..
 

KKRT00

Member
How can this be? I distinctly remember reading on GAF that the next gen consoles would have very little increase in performance by having an API thats closer to the metal than a PC. I was told Carmack was wrong and or either taken out of context. But now a better API comes out for PC offering massive performance spike and there is joy and happyness from the same people who told me it was a bunch of BS.

Reading comprehension fail?

Its still a BS and even those tests, based on APU with low end CPUs and GPUs in CPU limited scenarios, actually prove that.

----
Btw i'm still waiting for any real world scenario examples of 'coding to metal' general big performance gains in games in comparable platforms in flops.


====
From a software perspective, finding a bonus 45% is marketing cockery. 10%? 20% maybe but developers will not be impressed having to work on another renderer again, this isn't glide days.

To be fair Mantle support will be very widely used, like across all popular engines. It will be bare-bones support though, more on CPU side and renderer side of things. Only few will use GCN low-level optimizations and exclusive features of Mantle
 

diaspora

Member
How can this be? I distinctly remember reading on GAF that the next gen consoles would have very little increase in performance by having an API thats closer to the metal than a PC. I was told Carmack was wrong and or either taken out of context. But now a better API comes out for PC offering massive performance spike and there is joy and happyness from the same people who told me it was a bunch of BS.

They were right, you're not going to get Carmack's idiotic "2x" performance jump from slimmer drivers/software.
 

Serandur

Member
It seems strange to me that Mantle primarily helps in CPU-limited situations, yet we see absolutely no sign of Steamroller FX parts.
 

Perkel

Banned
It seems strange to me that Mantle primarily helps in CPU-limited situations, yet we see absolutely no sign of Steamroller FX parts.

We don't really know yet. From what DICE guy said it help a lot CPU to point where mid or even lowend cpu can play newest games without problem and it "helps" GPU. In what way, charts, performance is not known. From GPU standpoint we have only that slide:

ibkyJ6T4GpTiTQ.png


Which should point at proper multigpu scaling which alone would be amazing
 

k4n3

Banned
i play a ton of BF4 and have a 290x but my cpu is an old i7 920 OC to 3.2.... if mantle is aimed at anyone its people like me so im hoping for the best but id be happy with a stable 120fps on ultra ;) right now i get 60 at worst on a few maps (bf4 fps very on maps ALOT) and up to 100-120 on maps like locker
 
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