The AMD Mantle Thread

[Erenhardt]

So Star Citizen will be utilizing mante? But as far as I know it is not console game. If it is not a console title how can it use mantle?

Does it mean it will make its way to next gen consoles?

Or may it be first PC game exclusive that uses low level hardware access through mantle?

 

[VulgarDisplay]

So Star Citizen will be utilizing mante? But as far as I know it is not console game. If it is not a console title how can it use mantle?

Does it mean it will make its way to next gen consoles?

Or may it be first PC game exclusive that uses low level hardware access through mantle?

Since we don't know how mantle actually works yet it's hard to say, but I believe it has everything to do with the Direct 3d HLSL. Mantle is compatible with D3D HLSL. Instead of handing off all the information to the abstraction layer it just lets the GPU do all the work on the GPU itself instead of handing it off to the CPU for draw calls.

I know absolutely nothing about game engines/design so I'm entirely speculating.

 

[ShintaiDK]

So Star Citizen will be utilizing mante? But as far as I know it is not console game. If it is not a console title how can it use mantle?

Does it mean it will make its way to next gen consoles?

Or may it be first PC game exclusive that uses low level hardware access through mantle?

Mantle is not in consoles. And as such got nothing to do with consoles.

 

[Erenhardt]

Mantle is not in consoles. And as such got nothing to do with consoles.

Isn't it used to take optimizations made for consoles and transfer those to PC?

 

[Noctifer616]

Isn't it used to take optimizations made for consoles and transfer those to PC?

That is a possibility. I guess there has to be some kind of similarity between the low level API's from consoles and Mantle.

http://community.amd.com/community/...0/17/the-four-core-principles-of-amd-s-mantle

In short, Mantle is a new and better way to bring the code developers are already writing for next-generation consoles to life on the PC. It achieves this by being similar to, and often compatible with, the code they are already writing for those platforms.

 

[Spjut]

So Star Citizen will be utilizing mante? But as far as I know it is not console game. If it is not a console title how can it use mantle?

Does it mean it will make its way to next gen consoles?

Or may it be first PC game exclusive that uses low level hardware access through mantle?

As some have pointed out, Star Citizen is using CryEngine 3. So Star Citizen could be an indirect confirmation that Crytek too is supporting Mantle.

 

[Noctifer616]

As some have pointed out, Star Citizen is using CryEngine 3. So Star Citizen could be an indirect confirmation that Crytek too is supporting Mantle.

According to Wikipedia it's a modified CryEngine of the 4th Generation. Does that mean that they added Mantle support for Star Citizen only or will the engine have Mantle support for all other games based on it?

I guess time will tell.

 

[smackababy]

Isn't it used to take optimizations made for consoles and transfer those to PC?

Sort of. Mantle, as is speculated, will allow developers to make console-like optimizations on GNC hardware. The console APIs are different, and the interaction will be different, however, a lot of the code used may end up being reusable. How much? Well, that depends entirely on the developer I'd think.

How much performance is that actually going to translate to? Again, that depends on the developer, but also on how much overhead is actually removed. Even with removing the DX abstraction layer, there is still an abstraction layer of Mantle (at least, I imagine). How efficient that is, AMD has yet to say.

It also comes down to an ease of use for developers. I think it will end up being similar to Java and Hibernate. Object mapping from a database can be done at a more efficient level than Hibernate does, however, it will take a very specialized developer to do that. The API is incredibly easy for novices to pick up enough to work with, it isn't worth writing much of the code (and a lot of it is boilerplate code) for the minor performance gains you COULD get if you knew exactly what you were doing. I believe Mantle will end up being largely the same. The vast majority of code monkeys hired to work on these games, will stick with DX because it is easy and they can do fine with it. The studios filled with much better, more specialized developers will be able to use Mantle to create their own paths around DX and get some performance boosts.

 

[atticus14]

So Star Citizen will be utilizing mante? But as far as I know it is not console game. If it is not a console title how can it use mantle?

Does it mean it will make its way to next gen consoles?

Or may it be first PC game exclusive that uses low level hardware access through mantle?

Mantle is about AMD cards with GCN architecture, thats the only thing that matters.

The only thing it has to do with consoles is the fact that they also use GCN cards, so AMD has much more incentive to create Mantle to fully push the benefits of it's architecture across several platforms.

MS and Sony can deny that Mantle exists on consoles but if Devs can get benefits from using the same code across several platforms they will. They can call it whatever they want or nothing at all, it'll just be built into their engines whenever possible.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Let's have a look at the language being used.

The language being used should dispel any notion that this is single-digit gains. Understand that AMD has told them they can't give numbers, but they can say it as it is. Are they all crazy enough to be talking it up so much for sub 5% improvement?

That sig will be back to haunt you Phynaz.

We need to see some real numbers before either dismissing it or getting too enthused. Obviously developers using the API are going to make optimistic predictions. Kind of reminds me of how the console developers touted what graphical powerhouses the new consoles would be. I am not saying mantle will be a flop, but just that developers using it are not the most objective source.

Personally, with all the hype, to me anything less than a 20% or so improvement would be a disappointment.

 

[smackababy]

Obviously developers using the API are going to make optimistic predictions. Kind of reminds me of how the console developers touted what graphical powerhouses the new consoles would be.

You mean like that Sony guy claiming the PS4 was faster than gaming PCs?

 

[frozentundra123456]

In what way are the benefiting from the hype?

Let's say you're correct though and it's all about the hype - in that case it'll just be a matter of time before everybody is doing it, right? Activision, Ubisoft et al will all be joining in on the "hype" soon?

Obviously they are benefitting by implying that their games will run better or have more features than games that don't use mantle.

 

[psoomah]

If Mantle lives up to these descriptives - 'dramatic increases' (Oxide) and 'ridicule the Titan in performance' (AMD exec.), as it appears it will, there will be a massive disturbance in the (Ge) Force.

DICE, Eidos Montreal (Square Enix?), Oxide/Cloud Imperium Games ... known, Crytek and Activision ... nearly certain, Origin and Valve - good chance .. plus whoever else is revealed at APU13.

Incredibly powerful and cost competitive GPUs + Mantle + lots of developers on board = Nvidia in a hopelessly uncompetitive position, sales of AMD GPUs thru the roof and a rapidly expanding AMD AIB market share with gamers upgrading their systems for next gen games.

What triple AAA next gen game developer can afford to hold out on Mantle under these circumstances, especially when Battlefield 4 shows Mantle can be added after the fact?

 

[selni]

We need to see some real numbers before either dismissing it or getting too enthused. Obviously developers using the API are going to make optimistic predictions. Kind of reminds me of how the console developers touted what graphical powerhouses the new consoles would be. I am not saying mantle will be a flop, but just that developers using it are not the most objective source.
Personally, with all the hype, to me anything less than a 20% or so improvement would be a disappointment.

I suspect there may very well be some fairly large gains, but for AMD *CPUs* relative to Intel, not GPUs relative to nvidia. A lot of the discussion so far has been focused on the load the DX abstraction layer puts on the CPU, and the (lack of) scaling with multiple cores - currently this favours single threaded performance (and thus Intel) pretty heavily.

A large GPU perf improvement from mantle would be really, really surprising - abstraction layers usually aren't *that* expensive if well implemented, particularly since both GPU architectures were almost certainly designed with DX in mind already anyway.

Still, we'll see with the bf4 patch - speculation is no substitute for measurement.

 

[DooKey]

If Mantle lives up to these descriptives - 'dramatic increases' (Oxide) and 'ridicule the Titan in performance' (AMD exec.), as it appears it will, there will be a massive disturbance in the (Ge) Force.

DICE, Eidos Montreal (Square Enix?), Oxide/Cloud Imperium Games ... known, Crytek and Activision ... nearly certain, Origin and Valve - good chance .. plus whoever else is revealed at APU13.

Incredibly powerful and cost competitive GPUs + Mantle + lots of developers on board = Nvidia in a hopelessly uncompetitive position, sales of AMD GPUs thru the roof and a rapidly expanding AMD AIB market share with gamers upgrading their systems for next gen games.

What triple AAA next gen game developer can afford to hold out on Mantle under these circumstances, especially when Battlefield 4 shows Mantle can be added after the fact?

Slow down a bit. I remember lots of promises for BD. How did those pan out? AMD better deliver this time.

 

[SithSolo1]

Star Citizen has just officially announced support for Mantle. Hopefully it pans out.

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/.../13362-Star-Citizen-To-Include-Mantle-Support

 

[chimaxi83]

If you read that press release, they're seriously touting Mantle as a BIG PC development. Hopefully they don't fall flat on their faces with this. The CEO of the developer also said the game is being designed with the need for massive GPU horsepower and with 64 bit multicore processors in mind. I don't know about you guys, but that sounds great, as long as it's not all fluff and BS.

 

[frozentundra123456]

If you read that press release, they're seriously touting Mantle as a BIG PC development. Hopefully they don't fall flat on their faces with this. The CEO of the developer also said the game is being designed with the need for massive GPU horsepower and with 64 bit multicore processors in mind. I don't know about you guys, but that sounds great, as long as it's not all fluff and BS.

What processors *aren't* multi-core, 64 bit? Even a dual core celeron is technically multicore 64 bit. I assume he means highly multi threaded, but seriously, that statement is very vague.

 

[3DVagabond]

We need to see some real numbers before either dismissing it or getting too enthused. Obviously developers using the API are going to make optimistic predictions. Kind of reminds me of how the console developers touted what graphical powerhouses the new consoles would be. I am not saying mantle will be a flop, but just that developers using it are not the most objective source.

Personally, with all the hype, to me anything less than a 20% or so improvement would be a disappointment.

Agreed :thumbsup:

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Sort of. Mantle, as is speculated, will allow developers to make console-like optimizations on GNC hardware. The console APIs are different, and the interaction will be different, however, a lot of the code used may end up being reusable. How much? Well, that depends entirely on the developer I'd think.

I'd be surprised if there's much re-usable code, these are different APIs with different languages. But for sure a lot of the tricks used to optimize the performance, the actual concepts themselves will be transferable, so some of the work done to optimize consoles and figure out how to best use the hardware will transfer but it'll likely need the code refactored somewhat.

It won't be "free" by any stretch of the imagination which means, as smackababy said, it's going to be down to the developers support, we see a hugely varying degree of optimisation on console titles from downright awful to absolutely amazing. Rage was seriously impressive at 60fps but then it took them 5 years to make the game, so it's a trade off.

The best we can hope for in the PC space is major engine developers integrating support for it and abstracting away some of the optimizations into the engine so anyone licencing it just gets them for free.

 

[BrightCandle]

I fully expect Mantle to be at least 10x faster than DirectX, that is based on true low level APIs as found on the consoles. However this is 10x as many draw calls. A typical PC game is around 100-200 draw calls (you can confirm this yourself with GPUView if you like, its a free piece of software). A guy at Beyond3D wrote a program that has dummy draw calls in it so he could test the impact and on a modern CPU the frame rate was only impacted past 1000 draw calls. So I expect Mantle will probably support 10k draw calls before it runs into the same "problem" as DX.

Saying that DX already supports 5x - 10x more draw calls than the typical game uses. So the actual performance impact is questionable at best because its not currently a bottleneck. We have seen this with the early console games, they aren't magically performing better because of their low level APIs, infact they seem to perform about the same as the equivalent PC GPU but on a slower CPU. I just don't want people getting their hopes up too much for this API, it needs to prove a substantial improvement in real world scenarios (lots of them not just one game) before the drawbacks (a lot of extra development cost, a card specific API) are taken on.

In many ways I am surprised developers are signing on, I suspect AMD is paying them to add support, or the typical thing is to give them developers to add support into their games alongside their other devs.

 

[krumme]

Remember the purpose and the successcriteria of mantle guys. Using amd own priority its:

1. Number of ports
2. Quality of ports
3. Speed

I guess its far more important that enable playing Neeed for speed or whatever on low end machines than how topend gear we have eg. perform in bf4.

Bf4 aparently looks to run very fast on cgn out of the box. I would be surpriced if mantle can add more than 10% to that. I think we will see the the benefits for lower end cpu. And hopefully for us with 4 typical sb ib hw cpu we can see some improvement. Its incredible bf4 can run on ps4 on jaguar.

 

[krumme]

When developers signing on for Mantle there will be a lot of the usual Marketing BS.

Taking that marketing bs talk here and using it as strawmen is thread crapping imho. Nothing good comes from using Marketing bs as a foundation of a discussion.

The same goes for the 10x faster than DirectX and nonsense like that, taken out of context. Nothing but Strawmen.

We have had several threads here with the new 290 cards that went into smoke.
If you dont like Mantle fine, present the arguments instead of strawmen.

For my perspective it would be nice if we could get some more info about the content- the games, but i dont know where to find more. Anyone?

 

[0___________0]

I don't doubt that Crytek will support Mantle if it brings significant improvements, but it's possible that right now CIG just has a source license and implemented Mantle themselves with AMD's help. SC is looking to be a huge game, good to see Roberts try and take advantage of everything he can.

 

[frozentundra123456]

When developers signing on for Mantle there will be a lot of the usual Marketing BS.

Taking that marketing bs talk here and using it as strawmen is thread crapping imho. Nothing good comes from using Marketing bs as a foundation of a discussion.

The same goes for the 10x faster than DirectX and nonsense like that, taken out of context. Nothing but Strawmen.

We have had several threads here with the new 290 cards that went into smoke.
If you dont like Mantle fine, present the arguments instead of strawmen.

For my perspective it would be nice if we could get some more info about the content- the games, but i dont know where to find more. Anyone?

Lots of strawmen in your universe arent there?