The AMD Mantle Thread

[krumme]

Usually goal posts are moved after reviews or credible leaks are out. :/


I don't see "huge" FPS drops in any games, although that would be accounted for not only in the average but the minimum. In order for Mantle to live up to the hype, tangible performance metrics will have to be given.

"Max playable settings", "Better Gaming Experience" etc are intentionally ambiguous metrics which originate from one place. I promise you that Mantle will live or die based on the same metrics as DX.

I asume that goes for gsyncy also?

Ever since min fps was created. Ever since H started doing real testing gamers have known what compettitive and gamimg experience is.

Its not dx that decides the metrics. Its the gamers.

If mantle provides 30% benefit for a typical intel and amd quad core in the intense mp battles, thats what gamers for bf will notice and navigate for. Nothing else - not your personal opinion. Bf players whant consistent performance. And we know they buy hardware to get that performance.

For some pathetic reason some selfdestructive individuals whant to change focus to average single player performance in bf4. Sorry but that is pathetic.

 

[Shamrock]

I'm not reading 139 pages of this thread, so I will ask it here. Will the consumer have to download and install Mantle like you do DirectX?

 

[3DVagabond]

I'm not reading 139 pages of this thread, so I will ask it here. Will the consumer have to download and install Mantle like you do DirectX?

I don't think that anyone here has thought about that. One would assume so.

 

[Pottuvoi]

I don't think that anyone here has thought about that. One would assume so.

It will most likely be part of the drivers.

 

[f1sherman]

AMD, EA, DICE, Mr. Johan Andersson

I can't find it...MY CHRISTMASS PREZZI!
Where is it

 

[ShintaiDK]

I'm not reading 139 pages of this thread, so I will ask it here. Will the consumer have to download and install Mantle like you do DirectX?

Assume so yes. You need a driver, but that will be unified. But you need the Mantle API downloaded on top. It however could be part of AMDs driver install.

 

[f1sherman]

1 or was it 2 man*months... they said

 

[Pottuvoi]

1 or was it 2 man*months... they said

Getting something to work does not mean it is release ready.

 

[DamnedLife]

They "optimize" to limit the number of draw calls which uses a lot of time and resources. They would like to be able to use more draw calls, but they can't and have reasonable performance. The limited number of draw calls they can reasonably use is holding them back artistically.

^^This. I should start by saying I didn't play BF3 or ARMA but every other COD games. To me BF4 is the most realistic one, after seeing the destruction level in game. After seeing that building toppel, I was happy for seeing so much realism in a game. But still there is no objects flying around in those topling buildings bc there is none in those destructible buildings. When there is a desk, flowerpot is in the building, either it is non-destructible or it doesn't show in the debris. This imo is due to object limit there has to be implemented to achieve the highly optimised draw calls for an enjoyanble fps. So Mantle may not be just for fps increase, it can bring on better visuals, style and ideas along with performance increase. No matter what I or others speculate, I trust the developers thinking they are the ones who are asking for something like this in the first place, and that I can not be cynical about their statements. People call their statements PR, but paid or not, they didn't give any reason to doubt thier statements. If you speak the truth, it doesn't matter if you are paid to do so, in the end time will show how truthful they are, affecting their credibility in the long run in a good or bad way. So people may doubt them, but still being so cynical and calling for hard data/numbers before it is out is no way to go imo. This thread (which I followed from the start) is derailed by cynics left and right, while it's main reason of existance was to guess the promising prospects of this new api, not bad mouthing it.


By the way, while registering for the forum I doubted that I was a human being after many failed attempt to enter that image correctly, maybe it is a tad bit hard huh?

 

[pong lenis]

^^This. I should start by saying I didn't play BF3 or ARMA but every other COD games. To me BF4 is the most realistic one, after seeing the destruction level in game. After seeing that building toppel, I was happy for seeing so much realism in a game. But still there is no objects flying around in those topling buildings bc there is none in those destructible buildings. When there is a desk, flowerpot is in the building, either it is non-destructible or it doesn't show in the debris. This imo is due to object limit there has to be implemented to achieve the highly optimised draw calls for an enjoyanble fps. So Mantle may not be just for fps increase, it can bring on better visuals, style and ideas along with performance increase. No matter what I or others speculate, I trust the developers thinking they are the ones who are asking for something like this in the first place, and that I can not be cynical about their statements. People call their statements PR, but paid or not, they didn't give any reason to doubt thier statements. If you speak the truth, it doesn't matter if you are paid to do so, in the end time will show how truthful they are, affecting their credibility in the long run in a good or bad way. So people may doubt them, but still being so cynical and calling for hard data/numbers before it is out is no way to go imo. This thread (which I followed from the start) is derailed by cynics left and right, while it's main reason of existance was to guess the promising prospects of this new api, not bad mouthing it.


By the way, while registering for the forum I doubted that I was a human being after many failed attempt to enter that image correctly, maybe it is a tad bit hard huh?

I'm not one to be negative about Mantle, but if being able to see more objects flying around is simply limited by draw calls, we would have already seen it on consoles.

Hype kills everything, AMD and game devs are trying as best they can not to say a word about what new things Mantle will bring, but this has the effect of making everyone else create their own predictions and hyping it up to God-like status, so that when Mantle does come out everyone will be disappointed no matter how good the results are.

 

[Lonbjerg]

Calling an FPS (BF4) more realistic than a mil-sim (ARMA 3) makes my head hurt...

 

[DamnedLife]

I'm not one to be negative about Mantle, but if being able to see more objects flying around is simply limited by draw calls, we would have already seen it on consoles.

Hype kills everything, AMD and game devs are trying as best they can not to say a word about what new things Mantle will bring, but this has the effect of making everyone else create their own predictions and hyping it up to God-like status, so that when Mantle does come out everyone will be disappointed no matter how good the results are.

Nope not true.. bc consoles have inferior hw compared to pc, so higher amount of draw calls they can program all goes to make the game playable at 30 or 60fps with those graphics, IF they had a gpu similar to 7970 then those higher draw calls could be invested in lots of flying objects around bc now 60fps is a given BUT their hw lacks the puch for higher fidelity garphics, so they contend with medium. Consider that a PC with a gpu and cpu of a console is low-mid range not enthusiast, SO they potential of higher up hw is goes to garbage and only higher fps like 130-180fps on med, and 80fps on ultra! Those unnecessary 20fps cant be sacrificed for higher amount of objects and stuff because of the liitations of dx...

 

[DamnedLife]

Calling an FPS (BF4) more realistic than a mil-sim (ARMA 3) makes my head hurt...

No I did not do that! You are distorting everything on this thread. I said I did not play ARMA, and in my opinion (imo) BF4 is realistic COMPARED to COD games, I CAN NOT COMMENT ON A GAME I DID NOT PLAY!! Distort all you want, bc it serves your purpose but remember it decreases your credibility. Also I called BF4 realistic in the limited way considering the games I played, I even listed them. I would not play a mil-sim ever, can not comment of it's realism anyhow. Is BF4 more realistic than ARMA, I don't know and I don't care and therefore I did not comment on.

 

[Stewox]

You are always stuck with the limits of the API. With current API's we can't get near the theoretical limits of the hardware in most situations. With mantle this should change.

So we can say, that, we're never really benchmarking the hardware. We're benchmarking: APIs and drivers under this, or that hardware.

The same as said before: A new API dosn't magically transform hardware.

But it does have percieved effect of doing so against a higher level decade old API.

BF4 doesn't look like a good game for draw call overhead reduction to make an appreciable difference in fps from my own testing on 64 player games. I can't predict the future or the impact but BF4 isn't one of those games I consider has a problem with draw calls and hence it isn't likely to be a good poster child for what is possible.

That's for high-end. What about the rest ...

It will most likely be part of the drivers.

It could be DLLs with the game.

 

[Carfax83]

You stretch the numbers and there is no need to.

I didn't stretch any numbers. They are taken directly from Firaxis themselves in their presentation on their Lore engine, in which they claim they got 15K PLUS draw calls at 60 FPS.

Source

A normal game is limited to 2-3k batches. We are told mantle gets about 100k under the same circumstances. Thats the difference. What we know is Oxide have been working a meager 2 month on a beta api and still shows us 70k. That is a statement beyonds words. They tell us we get 200-300k in a year or two and 1M 2018. If they can show 70k on a beta in 2 months i tend to beliewe their own beliews.

And? The point is, what game could possibly utilize that many draw calls? You speak as though draw calls are the be all end all of gaming..

You're going to run into GPU bottlenecks long before you can fit that many objects on the screen at once.

You are comparing a dx Lada with a brand new highend Ferrari saying the Lada have improved with turbo and can drive 180km/h. I am tired of seeing this green multipass patched old dx Lada in this thread together with dead technology like batman. Why not make a DX thread and discuss all the excellent features there.

The point is that the technology is already there, whether through DirectX Multithreading (which admittedly requires refinement) or OpenGL bindless extensions.

That's not to say that Mantle would not bring benefits however. It would, but are those benefits great enough to outweigh backward compatibility and cross architectural compatibility?

I think not.

 

[Carfax83]

BF4 doesn't look like a good game for draw call overhead reduction to make an appreciable difference in fps from my own testing on 64 player games. I can't predict the future or the impact but BF4 isn't one of those games I consider has a problem with draw calls and hence it isn't likely to be a good poster child for what is possible.

The performance benefits with Mantle for BF4 probably comes from the reduction in API overhead, much like the performance improvement one would get going from DX9 to DX11, which is around 20% or so..

According to Fudzilla, AMD was claiming 20 to 50% boost. The higher range is probably in draw call limited scenarios, but one would expect those to be few.

I find it interesting that you can get similar performance gains with DX11 multithreading.

 

[SiliconWars]

The Nixxes guy said 20% was a good estimate for using async compute only in Thief. It's pretty likely that will be incorporated into the BF4 Mantle patch as well.

Slide 36 - http://www.slideshare.net/DICEStudio/mantle-for-developers "R&D for advanced GPU optimizations". That's the stage they are at now I believe, with repi talking about asymmetric crossfire with an APU in a recent tweet - that can only really be Kaveri and BF4 on Mantle. This makes me believe that the main stuff is done with and now they are just adding the icing.

 

[Lonbjerg]

Sitting in a train with spotty 3G, will return when I come home and hit my landline.

 

[Paul98]

So we can say, that, we're never really benchmarking the hardware. We're benchmarking: APIs and drivers under this, or that hardware.

You are benchmarking how quickly certain hardware can run specific code. It depends on the benchmark and what you are doing weather you are getting around the theoretical limit of the hardware or you are constrained for some reason.

 

[Stewox]

Here's the FPS from the demo, made it more clearer to see.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06OmAEOj308

Highly Recommended to use 720p or Download Source.


Notable Times:
3:10 or Frame5702
5:06 or Frame9195
5:07 or Frame9215
6:38 or Frame11949
(youtube probably won't be accurate enough to hit at that very frame)

EDIT: (holy smokes)
---------------------
MAX:
6:39,10 or Frame11968

~103595 BATCHES
@
15.1757 ms F2F or 65,89 FPS

 

[blightymate]

I'm not one to be negative about Mantle, but if being able to see more objects flying around is simply limited by draw calls, we would have already seen it on consoles.

Hype kills everything, AMD and game devs are trying as best they can not to say a word about what new things Mantle will bring, but this has the effect of making everyone else create their own predictions and hyping it up to God-like status, so that when Mantle does come out everyone will be disappointed no matter how good the results are.

We have already seen it on consoles - with 8 year old hardware. We will see a whole lot more of it on the next gen consoles over the next few years.

There will be few disappointed with performance gains in the 20-30% range which, from the information to hand, is well within the realm of what's possible.

 

[Spjut]

I find it interesting that you can get similar performance gains with DX11 multithreading.

But the multithreaded rendering isn't working for everyone. The only games that are confirmed to support it today are Civilization V and Assassins creed 3 and 4. And neither perform a huge degree worse on AMD cards

The engine programmers are no morons, if they could get pass the draw calls problem using DX11 multithreaded rendering or OpenGL+extensions, they most likely would do that. They would hit two birds with a stone.

While the studios supporting Mantle have all said they hope for Nvidia and Intel to adopt it, Chris Roberts even went so far as to say that they will support low-level APIs from Nvidia and Intel too
https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/76653/star-citizen-pc-ps4-and-consoles

 

[Stewox]

Ta da da dammmm:

 

[ShintaiDK]

Its hard to take Chris Roberts serious. He says he supports anything out of the blue.

If the draw calls is not a problem, then you wont see much improvement in the games you mentioned.

And as shown with other prescripted benchmarks vs ingame. The API part accounts for a small part at worst, hardly anything at best.

PS4 and Xbox One is also anything than impressive API wise.

 

[blightymate]

The Nixxes guy said 20% was a good estimate for using async compute only in Thief. It's pretty likely that will be incorporated into the BF4 Mantle patch as well.

Slide 36 - http://www.slideshare.net/DICEStudio/mantle-for-developers "R&D for advanced GPU optimizations". That's the stage they are at now I believe, with repi talking about asymmetric crossfire with an APU in a recent tweet - that can only really be Kaveri and BF4 on Mantle. This makes me believe that the main stuff is done with and now they are just adding the icing.

There's a fairly severe time crunch involved with BF4 Mantle critical as the initial impression of Mantle capability followed just days later by BF4 Mantle's showing on Kaveri, an extremely critical processor for AMD. On that basis Repi talking asymmetric crossfire with Kaveri would make it more likely pre-Kavei release BF4 Mantle might be ready. In an adjacent tweet Repi also noted the week between Xmas and New Years is a very bad time to release something like Mantle, so that might happen on Jan 2 or so. Or maybe released a week after CES, after the CES hype has had a chance to die down, followed by an avalanche of reviews over the next several weeks exploring every possible permutation of CPU, GPU and APU, including Kaveri, running BF4 Mantle. That last strikes me as the most logical move to best dominate the tech/gaming news cycle over an extended period of time and get maximum exposure of Mantle and it's capabilities. And of course insanely lengthy forum threads and discussions.