Mantle vs. G-sync

[d4z]

What do you guys think will be more of a game-changer? specifically for BF4.

I'm going to be buying a 280x from Newegg which is currently offering an extended return-period for the holidays, until end of January with no re-stocking fee. I was going to see how well Mantle does when it comes out in December. If I don't see much of an improvement I'm going to buy a GTX 770 and buy a G-sync monitor when they come out.

Do you guys know of any other websites offering an extended return period for the holidays?

 

[ingtar33]

two different things. mantle will give a boost in fps for free... gsync requires a $150 part on a monitor with >120hz refresh rate, which is a 300+ monitor. Gsync will smooth out the play experience and end stuttering, tearing and imput lag... mantle will give your gpu a significant boost in fps in mantle games...

when you see all the devs jumping on with mantle i think mantle has the best chance to be a significant change in the industry, gsync i think is more of a proof of concept.... i think it will be the foundation for a more industry wide universal standard going forward...

 

[d4z]

I know they are different things, but i'm putting them up against each other since one can only have either the AMD or nVidia

 

[ingtar33]

I know they are different things, but i'm putting them up against each other since one can only have either the AMD or nVidia

I think gsync is a niche product that won't amount to much 5 years down the road by itself... i think its revolutionary only in the sense it will probably spawn a universal syncing tech all monitors will carry that will work with both amd and nvidia cards.

 

[mauller07]

Both of them aim to alleviate different issues but Mantle helps alleviate more issues in general and allows far bigger changes to occur in games.

more draw calls means more dynamic/unique objects in the game/on screen at one time allowing devs to create more unique, realistic and immersible environments with reduced cpu load freeing the cpu for other things.

fewer fps drops (even an increase in fps) and corruption issues as mantle runs bellow the normal windows api stack that directx has to call through before any calls are made to hardware

easier porting as mantle uses Microsofts HLSL as its basis so the majority of current DX code will most likely be a cut and paste job for immediate performance improvements before any to metal optimisation is performed due to Mantle being a thinner API.

better ports from consoles, as both consoles use GCN based hardware, even if sony and microsoft call their api's unique and only usable on their console, AMD still provides the hardware command lists their API's use so the code will most likely be very much the same and copy and paste for mantle ports for metal based code.

graphics card synchronisation will eliminate tearing and stuttering as stated which will be nice but still if the fps drops bellow a certain level (even 25 fps) it will look horrid still and does not improve performance in general. it would be nice if nvidia made it an open standard or if someone just done one up on nvidia and provided graphics card based synchronisation using displayport packets like nvidia is.


another big thing is AMD's true audio DSP, this will allow full positional 3d audio calculations using first order reflections of sounds using game geometry with direct access to the geometry info on the gpu allowing more realistic sound scapes and realistic sound effects to be generated in realtime.

amd did state that it can take 15% of a cpu to perform high quality reverb calculation (reverb being the sum of all the reflections for a given position in a space) but this is for a single sound of 5 seconds in length, most likely also including other modification of the sound due to surface texture type altering the reflected audio as with what aureal did with their 3d audio cards. (you can find some brilliant aureal 3d videos on youtube and here toni.org/a3d/)

the AMD sound DSP can process 100's of environmental sound calculations and effects with ease, even a high end xeon system would crawl to its knees as it is too general purpose compared to the DSP for this sort of workload compared to a cheap Programmable DSP.


we will just have to wait and see overall but im expecting mantle to give a large graphical and performance boost to new games on pc, we will get a demo of what mantle can do with basic implementation on the 11th as oxide studios will be showcasing its Nitrous engine using Galactic civilisation 3 as its demo game at AMD APU13 developer conference.

 

[ZippyPinhead]

two different things. mantle will give a boost in fps for free... gsync requires a $150 part on a monitor with >120hz refresh rate, which is a 300+ monitor. Gsync will smooth out the play experience and end stuttering, tearing and imput lag... mantle will give your gpu a significant boost in fps in mantle games...

when you see all the devs jumping on with mantle i think mantle has the best chance to be a significant change in the industry, gsync i think is more of a proof of concept.... i think it will be the foundation for a more industry wide universal standard going forward...

Partially incorrect......g-sync will wrok from 30hz all the way up to 144hz and beyond. It will work with any monitor with the G-sync module in reality.

 

[ZippyPinhead]

I know they are different things, but i'm putting them up against each other since one can only have either the AMD or nVidia

I think gsync is a niche product that won't amount to much 5 years down the road by itself... i think its revolutionary only in the sense it will probably spawn a universal syncing tech all monitors will carry that will work with both amd and nvidia cards.

It already has amounted to a revolutionary step forward in the few remaining graphic issues with todays graphic setups. I have the G-sync setup for my PC. It has completely eliminated stuttering, screen tear and no lag. My setup runs perfectly smooth now from 30fps all the way up to 144fps.

 

[ZippyPinhead]

Both of them aim to alleviate different issues but Mantle helps alleviate more issues in general and allows far bigger changes to occur in games.

more draw calls means more dynamic/unique objects in the game/on screen at one time allowing devs to create more unique, realistic and immersible environments with reduced cpu load freeing the cpu for other things.

fewer fps drops (even an increase in fps) and corruption issues as mantle runs bellow the normal windows api stack that directx has to call through before any calls are made to hardware

easier porting as mantle uses Microsofts HLSL as its basis so the majority of current DX code will most likely be a cut and paste job for immediate performance improvements before any to metal optimisation is performed due to Mantle being a thinner API.

better ports from consoles, as both consoles use GCN based hardware, even if sony and microsoft call their api's unique and only usable on their console, AMD still provides the hardware command lists their API's use so the code will most likely be very much the same and copy and paste for mantle ports for metal based code.

graphics card synchronisation will eliminate tearing and stuttering as stated which will be nice but still if the fps drops bellow a certain level (even 25 fps) it will look horrid still and does not improve performance in general. it would be nice if nvidia made it an open standard or if someone just done one up on nvidia and provided graphics card based synchronisation using displayport packets like nvidia is.


another big thing is AMD's true audio DSP, this will allow full positional 3d audio calculations using first order reflections of sounds using game geometry with direct access to the geometry info on the gpu allowing more realistic sound scapes and realistic sound effects to be generated in realtime.

amd did state that it can take 15% of a cpu to perform high quality reverb calculation (reverb being the sum of all the reflections for a given position in a space) but this is for a single sound of 5 seconds in length, most likely also including other modification of the sound due to surface texture type altering the reflected audio as with what aureal did with their 3d audio cards. (you can find some brilliant aureal 3d videos on youtube and here toni.org/a3d/)

the AMD sound DSP can process 100's of environmental sound calculations and effects with ease, even a high end xeon system would crawl to its knees as it is too general purpose compared to the DSP for this sort of workload compared to a cheap Programmable DSP.


we will just have to wait and see overall but im expecting mantle to give a large graphical and performance boost to new games on pc, we will get a demo of what mantle can do with basic implementation on the 11th as oxide studios will be showcasing its Nitrous engine using Galactic civilisation 3 as its demo game at AMD APU13 developer conference.

Mantle is proving to be more typical vaporware from AMD. Its still not even on one single game yet. It it will probably be implemented on LESS than 5 games over the next 2-3 years. Not that impressive. Whats worse is that real world gains from using it will on average only be about 5-10% in terms of frames per second. Ive seen driver optimizations do just as good and even better. Over hype from the King of over hype.......AMD.