AMD GPU14 Tech Event Sept 25 - AMD Hawiian Islands

[HurleyBird]

I agree 1000000%. Leave the proprietary APIs to the consoles. Open platforms like PCs need open standards.

DirectX is a proprietary standard, and 98% of PC titles use it. That doesn't make mantle a good thing though. If Mantle catches on it's going to be one of the best or one of the worst things to happen to PC gaming, with very little middle ground between those extremes.

 

[Silverforce11]

A lot of people are shocked over this development, but what did you guys expected? AMD graphics is the core for the next 8 years of gaming.. surely they will abuse it.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

I find it very interesting, but at the same time anti competitive and anti consumer.

I think it's eery how similar to Intel this is, only on a whole new level of control.

Given how receptive the AMD fan base is to this, I'm expecting the world to implode from a massive overload of irony.

 

[sontin]

DirectX is a proprietary standard, and 98% of PC titles use it.

It's open to other vendors. Mantle is proprietary like Glide only accessable for GCN+ cards.

I guess the difference it's very clear.

A lot of people are shocked over this development, but what did you guys expected? AMD graphics is the core for the next 8 years of gaming.. surely they will abuse it.

"Core"? Lol. They are much smaller in the PC market (20% CPU and 36% GPU market) and a no show in the mobile world.
The WiiU is flopping and nobody know how good the new consoles will sell.

 

[BD2003]

Games will still run on DX, it will just be an option for GCN Radeons, enable Mantle and get a speed boost.

In a way its the same as PhysX, games still run on non-NV hardware, but if you have NV hardware, it runs much faster.

Its a question of how prominent these two proprietary APIs will become. I guess it doesn't take much stretch of the imagination to see Mantle being a major success given that console developers were asking AMD for this API, to make console <-> PC game development easier.

This is way more damaging to competition than PhysX ever was. I'm not giving nvidia a pass for PhysX, CUDA or 3D vision, those are all anti-competitive too, but this is a dick move on a whole other level. It might seem innocent for a while, but it will take years for the damage to be done.

It's making a deal with the devil. It seems like a good idea now, but you'll end up regretting it down the line.

 

[Phynaz]

It's open to other vendors. Mantle is proprietary like Glide only accessable for GCN+ cards.

I guess the difference it's very clear.

Really, so Ubuntu could implement DX if they wanted to, and MS wouldn't care?

 

[monstercameron]

Really, so Ubuntu could implement DX if they wanted to, and MS wouldn't care?

dont feed the trolls, they continue to argue and misrepresent what mantle is.

 

[HurleyBird]

It's open to other vendors. Mantle is proprietary like Glide only accessable for GCN+ cards.

I guess the difference it's very clear.

I don't see being tied to Windows as being any better than being tied to Radeon graphics cards. If in the long run Mantle somehow gives AMD a monopoly on gaming, it will at least free us from the Windows monopoly on gaming.

 

[GaiaHunter]

CUDA - no one gives a damn for gaming.
PhysX - most people wouldn't give a damn with the exception of hardware accelerated games skip on normal features to just apply the hardware accelerate physx feature.
3D - tiny tiny niche

AMD mantle - in theory faster performance for AMD.

Is a faster performing piece of hardware from AMD or NVIDIA anti competitive?
Is a faster driver from AMD or NVIDIA anti competitive?

As long AMD mantle changes nothing for NVIDIA there is no anti competition, unless we are also saying Intel compiler is also anti competitive.

Or that optimization for AMD or NVIDIA via AMD Evolved and TWIMTBP programs are also anti competitive (unless normal gaming features, like AA, are vendor locked).

So, if AMD mantle is nothing more than optimization

 

[Techhog]

So, is Mantle exclusive to the new series, or does it also work with HD 7000?

Also, I get the feeling that most of the anger here is caused by the fact that it was compared to consoles. lol

 

[ams23]

The amount of FUD being promoted in this thread is unbelievable

First of all, CUDA is not an API like "Mantle". CUDA is a "parallel computing platform and programming model" that makes it easier to use an NVIDIA GPU for general purpose computing and for extracting more parallelism (http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2012/09/10/what-is-cuda-2/). At the time that CUDA was created, there was nothing else available to effectively do this.

Second of all, "Mantle" as an API is destined to fail in the marketplace for a variety of reasons. One is that the majority of PC gamers and PC Game developers (including John Carmack and Tim Sweeney) prefer NVIDIA GPU's + Intel CPU's compared to AMD GPU's/CPU's. Two is that open platform gaming (which includes Windows PC, Android PC, SteamOS, etc) is growing. Three is that ultra mobile platform gaming is growing, and NVIDIA/Intel/Qualcomm are way ahead of AMD in that area. For example, the tremendous efficiency gains that NVIDIA is seeing in the ultra mobile GPU space starting with the Kepler.M GPU in "Logan" will filter through their entire lineup in the near future with Maxwell and beyond.

 

[cmdrdredd]

the slide says multiplatform i dont recall him mentioning open source. platform would mean it works on any gcn hardware(windows with gcn card/apu, ps4 gcn apu, xbone gcn apu, linux on gcn card/apu).

mantle the software interface may be open to anyone wanting to build a direct to metal library.



for those that dont get direct to metal calls, the simplest analogy would be fedexing a package.
california vinyard needs to send grapes to winery in next county.

directX method: give grapes to fedex, fedex packages grapes into arbitrary containers, fly to fedex tennessee sorting center, fly back to california, send to winery, winery sorts red and white grapes, makes wine.

call to metal method: pack red grape into 18wheeler truck & pack white grape into 2nd truck, drive to winery, make wine.

mantle simply cuts out the middle man steps of the process.


if mantle is anything like the ps3 libgcm, instead of translating game engine assets in to generic DX11 instructions, mantle will package the assets into a format that the gcn registers can operate on directly through a library tag/call.

on the pc it will be a nice reduction of dx overhead. but most games will still use directaudio and directinput parts of dx.

with true audio and mantle, steambox just needs an api for controller inputs. this is an anti MS move, thats why they wasted an hour on the audio portion of the presentation.

Valve is partnered up with Nvidia though.

 

[monstercameron]

So, is Mantle exclusive to the new series, or does it also work with HD 7000?

seemingly all gcn-based cards.

 

[cmdrdredd]

I agree completely, Windows has outlived it's usefulness. It's time to move on to *truly* open platforms and standards, enough with this proprietary BS already. It's fine in the early stages of a technology, but to make an attempt to close down what was previously open...it's just ridiculous.

Next thing you know, Cisco is going to announce a proprietary form of WiFi that's faster than anything else out there, but only works with Cisco gear. Can you imagine what a nightmare that would be?

Try getting support for Linux and it's a total nightmare. That is why closed systems work better.

 

[OCGuy]

A lot of people are shocked over this development, but what did you guys expected? AMD graphics is the core for the next 8 years of gaming.. surely they will abuse it.

I don't play on consoles.

 

[Techhog]

seemingly all gcn-based cards.

Cool. Is it dependent on AMD CPUs though?

 

[GaiaHunter]

Second of all, "Mantle" as an API is destined to fail in the marketplace for a variety of reasons. One is that the majority of PC gamers and PC Game developers (including John Carmack and Tim Sweeney) prefer NVIDIA GPU's + Intel CPU's compared to AMD GPU's/CPU's. Two is that open platform gaming (which includes Windows PC, Android PC, SteamBox, etc) is growing. Three is that ultra mobile gaming is growing, and NVIDIA and Intel are way ahead of AMD in that area. For example, the tremendous efficiency gains that NVIDIA is seeing in the ultra mobile GPU space with the Kepler.M GPU in "Logan" will filter through their entire lineup in the near future with Maxwell and beyond.

Fourth, the console market which is at least as big (or bigger) as the PC gaming is on AMD.
Fifth, with mantle there is potential that all the games that are multi platform will be optimized for AMD hardware.

 

[SlowSpyder]

I find it very interesting, but at the same time anti competitive and anti consumer.

I think it's eery how similar to Intel this is, only on a whole new level of control.

Given how receptive the AMD fan base is to this, I'm expecting the world to implode from a massive overload of irony.

Rory did say he wants to make AMD the predator again. He's really leveraging those console wins here.

 

[GaiaHunter]

Valve is partnered up with Nvidia though.

I doubt NVIDIA will be running on DX in any valve console/os.

 

[monstercameron]

Cool. Is it dependent on AMD CPUs though?

they didnt mention anything about cpus in the presentation, so I am guessing no.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

The amount of FUD being promoted in this thread is unbelievable

First of all, CUDA is not an API like "Mantle". CUDA is a "parallel computing platform and programming model" that makes it easier to use an NVIDIA GPU for general purpose computing and for extracting more parallelism (http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2012/09/10/what-is-cuda-2/). At the time that CUDA was created, there was nothing else available to effectively do this.

Second of all, "Mantle" as an API is destined to fail in the marketplace for a variety of reasons. One is that the majority of PC gamers and PC Game developers (including John Carmack and Tim Sweeney) prefer NVIDIA GPU's + Intel CPU's compared to AMD GPU's/CPU's. Two is that open platform gaming (which includes Windows PC, Android PC, SteamOS, etc) is growing. Three is that ultra mobile platform gaming is growing, and NVIDIA/Intel/Qualcomm are way ahead of AMD in that area. For example, the tremendous efficiency gains that NVIDIA is seeing in the ultra mobile GPU space with the Kepler.M GPU in "Logan" will filter through their entire lineup in the near future with Maxwell and beyond.

Tim Sweeney and john carmack are PC developers? What was their last good game? Rage and gears of war? They develop for consoles because that's where the money is. Do you think they will prefer nvidia when amd gives them the low level access to the hardware they have been begging for, and all next gen consoles are running amd hardware?

I still can't believe you called those two PC devs. This isn't 2003.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Fourth, the console market which is at least as big (or bigger) as the PC gaming is on AMD.
Fifth, with mantle there is potential that all the games that are multi platform will be optimized for AMD hardware.

console is not PC.

 

[cmdrdredd]

I doubt NVIDIA will be running on DX in any valve console/os.

That isn't even the point nor does it make any sense in the context of the post I made and the one I quoted.

Again Nvidia is partnered up with Valve to support the steamOS. Nvidia doesn't have any access to this trueaudio or mantle stuff. Nor do I think it even matters because Linux can't run DX and that means a ton of games that won't work. That's totally another topic anyhow.

The point was, Nvidia will be way ahead of AMD on linux support and none of this will affect windows gaming all that much. The new XBox uses DX11.2 directly which translates to simple ports to and from PC already.

 

[SlowSpyder]

I wonder if this might make even middle of the road APU-powered laptops decent gaming machines down the road.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

console is not PC.

They are essentially united this generation. Mantle brings them another step closer.