Ask Me Anything - Official AMD Radeon Representative

[ubercake]

Thanks again.

 

[Thracks]

Will Mantle, in near future, help with better utilization of FX CPU threads/cores? I have 6300 @4.5GHz and I haven't seen game that could use it in more then ~40-50%. More often I see about 20-30% total CPU usage during gaming. That is a lot of potential wasted. Is Mantle about to fix anything in that matter?

http://wccftech.com/amd-mantle-demo-game-gpubound-cpu-cut-2ghz/

I think this will tell you all about what Mantle is supposed to do. Yes, Mantle definitely helps parallelism, but Mantle also reduces CPU utilization by alleviating the bottlenecks that would cause a CPU to choke as the utilization goes sky high.

Relevant quote:

Not only did it free up a lot of CPU time when switched to Mantle, but Mantle itself took only a fraction of CPU time to function as opposed to DirectX’s required driver thread. This means that developers have the option to go one of two ways if they use Mantle: they can utilize that unused CPU time to improve their game, or they can simply drop the CPU requirement. The viability of lower CPU performance requirements was later verified even further (at 39:55) when the speaker disclosed that even when underclocked to 2GHz, the FX-8350 was still waiting for the GPU to finish on any given frame. Typically, we would see things the other way around.

 

[Gunss]

Hi.
I have an laptop with a HD8850M, but it is now called R9 270M. And I can't enable mantle option in any game that I tried so far, I tried in BF4, civilization beyond earth, and I never saw the option to change do the Mantle API. I'm using the latest Catalyst driver version, the 14.12 Omega. What do I need to do to activate mantle in those games?

 

[Thracks]

Hi.
I have an laptop with a HD8850M, but it is now called R9 270M. And I can't enable mantle option in any game that I tried so far, I tried in BF4, civilization beyond earth, and I never saw the option to change do the Mantle API. I'm using the latest Catalyst driver version, the 14.12 Omega. What do I need to do to activate mantle in those games?

Let me check for you. Can you please email me? robert.hallock@amd.com. I want to follow up with you after this AMA ends.

 

[AndrewFreedman]

The AMA has officially concluded!

Thanks a ton to AMD's Robert "Thracks" Hallock for taking time out of his busy schedule to answer the great questions our community wanted to ask. We know it's tough to take this much time to answer questions, but we and our users are very appreciative of the time you spent to engage with the community at Tom's Hardware.

We also want to thank the team at AMD that help us put this together, finding time and resources to help make this happen. We appreciate the hard work and your taking the time to let the Tom's Hardware community ask questions.

You can expect a digest of this AMA soon, and be on the lookout for more AMA announcements!

 

[zeyuanfu]

Will there ever be a 3 or 4 GB version of the Tonga GPU (R9 285)? It performs kinda poorly in Mantle in games like BF4. I would post a review, but I forgot the site