AMD Mantle Now Adopted by Three More Game Developers

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blppt

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I'm in the minority on this, but I really miss the days of Glide...where if you had a 3dfx card, things were pretty much guaranteed to work exactly the way the developer intended. It sure sounds like AMD's Mantle is similar in its approach, and it may give me yet another reason to go back to Radeon in the future.
 
So what 7000 series models will GCN support? On AMD's website, they mention it being available for select high performance models. Is it safe to assume they are referring exclusively to the R9 and 79xx series GPU's?
 

usbgtx550

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I'm not too sure how I feel about mantle. On one side, I think it's great! Who doesn't want an extra performance boost. On the other hand, I feel this will fragment the industry further. What if Nvidia was to respond with their own version of mantle. Now, we have developers having to worry about coding for two distinct environments on the same platform, which doesn't help the pc's case when developers argue that consoles are much more friendly when it comes to game development.

We'll just have to wait and see how this plays out.
 

lpedraja2002

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Awesome, keep the support for Mantle going I will probably be switching to AMD based hardware if all the good news keep coming in. Star Citizen looks like a fairy dream come true, I hope it does what Crysis did for graphics all those years ago.
 
There are two questions left:

1) How will this play nicely in windowed mode, or if something pops up onscreen (skype, chat window, etc)? To make it any faster than DX11.2 it needs to completely avoid the usermode driver conversion as much as possible, but that also breaks how windows works in the first place.

2) How does AMD plan to support backwards compatibility without an architecture freeze? After all, the point of OGL and DX was to ignore how low level execution implementation is done as long as the result was valid. Consoles have API and hardware freezes upon launch to ensure backwards compatibility (or include old hardware alongside the new one like PS3 and Wii did), but Mantle won't have that option. Does this mean that AMD is giving up ever scrapping the highly inefficient GCN architecture?
 
I'll keep an eye out, but these 3 companies are so niche, they are barely a blip on the radar screens. Star Citizen is still vaporware with a hangar, a few demo ships, and a ton of crytek placeholders at this point. If one game needs more CPU horsepower, it'll be this one. It'll be like Crysis... one of the most beautiful games ever made that 99% of people won't be able to play in a fraction of its full glory, without a couple xeons and 4 graphics cards. Have fun running all of that 24/7 (worst case scenario provided by yours truly)

I'll jump all over Star Citizen when (if) it hits retail.

Maybe if mantle gains enough popularity, we'll see a huge leap in directX. I still prefer the idea of a universal API w/ manufacturer specific extensions versus seperate APIs from seperate companies.
 

mariusmotea

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In near future will have the same game in two editions, Nvidia edition and AMD edition. I don't belive this is a bad thing, because in this way consumers will get the best possible experience (like windows x86 ans x64).
 

Akizu

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I think for now its best to wait till some games that support Mantle gets released to see some real life benchmarks and then maybe wait some more to see if there really will be more titles supporting it... If Mantle will give just like 5~10% performance boost and there will be just like 5 titles/year supporting it then it wont be that important... Just like PysX was for Nvidia... A nice bonus but not something that anyone would really care about.
 


lol can that happen? i mean have we ever see a game that is Gaming Evolve title but at the same time it also TWTMTBP title?
 


i see a lot of stuff going into the game. hey they even have nvidia gpu physx in them.

https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/65769/
 

qlum

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While I am not a fan of vendor locking I think this type of thing is still defendable, firstly nvidea is free to use it if they want to and second its real world benefits are big enough to warrant it, if nvidea would build a similar thing sure devs had to support both but in the end the games would be better for it, better then when you use directx or opengl with their big overheads.
 
Actually nVidia did this already, restricting Physx is in a way fragmenting the industry.
Same as it is console exclusives, and im guessing you guys can think of many other examples like this.

That why i bearly buy anything anymore. One, maybe 2 games a year. In the apst, in 2007? 12-15 games each year.
When the industry starts going wrong, you save some money, they dont earn it. Fair deal.
 


How are they free to use it? It's proprietary to AMD and only works on GCN cards so exactly how is Nvidia able to use it?:heink:
 

gallidorn

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When AMD says Mantle will only provide PC support, hopefully that means Windows & Linux. If they don't include Mantle for Linux, they could be missing a huge opportunity. SteamOS will be released soon, and without Mantle, AMD could be leaving the door open for Nvidia to dominate Linux gaming.
 

somebodyspecial

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It's a good thing it's getting added as they are way behind currently when benchmarked. 69fps to 56fps (780 vs. 290x):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djvZaHHU4I8
Go to 8:40 in the vid. Benchmarks start there, both cards OC'ed to the max they could get. Perhaps some of it is just AMD hasn't been working with them (although mantle announcement makes it seem like maybe they have). Or maybe they just got going. Either way it's 3 more games that will cost AMD money.

Nobody programs for free, which is the problem with API's like this, glide, physx etc unless you own the whole market. Nobody will do it if you don't pay them (especially when we're talking a portion of AMD's 1/3 of the discrete market - so maybe 10% of gamers by next xmas? since no backward cards can do it-only new ones) and the next rev of cards always moots the issue anyway as everything speeds up. But they have to do this if they want anyone to notice Mantle.

I'm wondering how much this costs for these 3 and we have yet to see how much it gains. We'll know in a month I guess with BF4 patch.
 

somebodyspecial

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AFAIK this is just like Gsync. They CAN license their tech to their enemy but so far neither side has mentioned anything about it and it would just be bad business for NV to give out Gsync to AMD (everyone else, mobile etc cool, but no AMD cards for at least a while), and equally bad for AMD to give Mantle to NV if it's really going to help perf (they NEED this perf to get back market share). Also both would require some redesigning of hardware most likely. I don't think Gsync (as it is now on a NV PCB for their cards only supposedly) would work with AMD cards. Same in reverse with Mantle on NV. Both sides would need to license the other guys stuff and bolt something on to a new hardware gen. On the mantle side, I'm not sure if it can be adapted at all without NV producing a GCN card. That ain't going to happen...LOL.

I don't see either side even licensing these two things for quite some time if they even can get it to work in some way. I do believe NV will license out Gsync to all screen makers, but not to other SOCS, AMD etc for a while. You want a foot in the SOC door and this helps get you further in along with great gaming experience, drivers, etc from kepler soon. On AMD's side, with such small share and consoles blocking it all, you'll need to pay game after game. I doubt they'll even have 10% on cards that are mantle capable by next xmas and you can't charge more for AMD card owners for spending time on this. Considering BF4 cost 8mil supposedly, I'm wondering how much these will steal from the bottom line. They made 48mil this Q. That's a lot of your profit in ONE mantle game.

Physx has been in Xbox360/ps3/wii and both new gens, tons of pc cards (65% of the market has supported it for a while, every card sold since what 2008 from NV?) and it's only in 60 games...LOL. When I looked at the list of games using it, many were NV promoted stuff (meaning they paid them to do it). If NV who has no debt, 2.7B cash, makes ~140mil/Q can't afford to get it into more game with consoles having it for years, pc for years etc it says devs won't do it free even when there is a much larger audience that could take advantage on NV's side and with consoles having it too (280mil consoles!+PC's). I forgot macs also ;) Not much hope for Mantle unless AMD gets bought by someone with cash to push it IMHO. Also most of the big games using physx do it on CPU (I'd call that a bit of a fail). Tough to push a new API. Ask 3DFX/Glide ;) I loved my Voodoo cards... :)
 
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