[Devblog] Mantle comes to Sniper Elite 3!

[Gloomy]

http://www.rebellion.co.uk/blog/2014/10/2/mantle-comes-to-sniper-elite-3

Some interesting stuff there.

 

[Dankk]

Cool! Sniper Elite 3 was already a very well-coded and well-optimized game to begin with, IMO. I'll have to try it now with Mantle enabled.

I saw it download an update on Steam today, so I'm guessing that's what it was.

 

[Silverforce11]

Surprising that they got decent gains in a very GPU limited game. The CPU isn't bottlenecked at all.

Interesting they noted a lot of the gains came from better memory access and control, as well as their engine's ability to hold more high-res textures in memory simultaneously, improving IQ.

Hopefully DX12 will enable these finer "to-the-metal" features.. but I suspect we may be seeing some GCN specific features in play here.

 

[Wild Thing]

Very interesting results.
That's going to be hard to refute,tho I'm sure the usual cast of characters will be in here shortly to announce it's all "lies" and can't possibly be correct.
Thanks for posting OP.

 

[el etro]

Surprising that they got decent gains in a very GPU limited game. The CPU isn't bottlenecked at all.

Interesting they noted a lot of the gains came from better memory access and control, as well as their engine's ability to hold more high-res textures in memory simultaneously, improving IQ.

Hopefully DX12 will enable these finer "to-the-metal" features.. but I suspect we may be seeing some GCN specific features in play here.

Can you pick some benches to us?? You have two 290s here, Mantle may make you FPS numbers explode!

 

[frozentundra123456]

All right, I will take the bait. First, I would wait for independent tests. Secondly, the highest gains are at resolutions that I seriously doubt anyone will be using. Only around a 5 to 12 percent gain at settings that I would expect people to be playing when using the 3770k.

I do have an AMD card. This is not a game that I would be interested in buying, but it would be nice if they put out a demo that I could use to test out mantle with my older HD7770.

 

[Gloomy]

All right, I will take the bait. First, I would wait for independent tests. Secondly, the highest gains are at resolutions that I seriously doubt anyone will be using. Only around a 5 to 12 percent gain at settings that I would expect people to be playing when using the 3770k.

I do have an AMD card. This is not a game that I would be interested in buying, but it would be nice if they put out a demo that I could use to test out mantle with my older HD7770.

13% gain at 1920x1200 max settings while increasing IQ is bad? :|

What bait are you talking about?

 

[Nevk]

I have test it.

Mantle is great so I will not come back to dx11.

 

[DiogoDX]

Devs still not using async compute or any other fancy GPU features.:thumbsdown: Just port the engine to Mantle will show only small results if the game is not CPU limited.

 

[PPB]

After trying mantle for like 6 months, I will hold my guns till I see more consistency in the behaviour of the API. Mantle on BF4 has been a rollercoaster. The performance and frametime gains are certainly there, but the kirks are just too many to ignore, at least in my user case (most of them have been reported to AMD tho, here's hoping they are eventually fixed). I will their first user after it becomes more consistent or gets out of beta, no doubt about that.

But in the meantine, DX11 for me it is.

PD: Would kill for the async compute. Would be really nice to put that APU iGP or Intel CPU iGP to do some useful work.

 

[iiiankiii]

Interesting. I thought Mantle only helped on CPU bounded game. If you look at the graph in the link, you will see that the game is GPU bounded. Yet, Mantle gave it a performance boost anyway.

 

[frozentundra123456]

13% gain at 1920x1200 max settings while increasing IQ is bad? :|

What bait are you talking about?

I didn't say it was bad. My main point was that I take any data from a developer with reservations until it is confirmed by independent review sites. Yes, if you have an amd card it is a free gain, so that is great, but at normal resolutions hardly a game changer.

 

[Gloomy]

PD: Would kill for the async compute. Would be really nice to put that APU iGP or Intel CPU iGP to do some useful work.

That's not what asynchronous compute is. Async compute is what AMD calls the ability to simultanously schedule compute tasks as the GPU is working on graphics. Essentially making part of the compute budget free as it becomes hidden in the little crevices of each frame where the GPU is held up by something else.

 

[Silverforce11]

Can you pick some benches to us?? You have two 290s here, Mantle may make you FPS numbers explode!

I would but I saw the price tag on Steam along with all the user reviews concerning the lame DLC.. seriously why do developers do that, pay full price for a game and cut back content requiring more $$ for DLCs?? No thanks.

 

[zlatan]

Surprising that they got decent gains in a very GPU limited game. The CPU isn't bottlenecked at all.

This is not surprising. This is Asynchronous Compute, first time on PC, yay. They run the shadow mapping phase and the Obscurance Fields effect in parallel. So if the GPU has enough CUs (20+), than the entire Obscurance Fields effect will be free. Yes, you read that right, activating it won't affect the performance.
The direct memory management also useful in GPU-limited scenarios, especially for an Asura-like texture streaming system.

 

[Gloomy]

This is not surprising. This is Asynchronous Compute, first time on PC, yay. They run the shadow mapping phase and the Obscurance Fields effect in parallel. So if the GPU has enough CUs (20+), than the entire Obscurance Fields effect will be free. Yes, you read that right, activating it won't affect the performance.
The direct memory management also useful in GPU-limited scenarios.

They're actually not using async compute yet.

 

[dacostafilipe]

This is not surprising. This is Asynchronous Compute, first time on PC, yay. They run the shadow mapping phase and the Obscurance Fields effect in parallel. So if the GPU has enough CUs (20+), than the entire Obscurance Fields effect will be free. Yes, you read that right, activating it won't affect the performance.
The direct memory management also useful in GPU-limited scenarios, especially for an Asura-like texture streaming system.

^_^

There’s still a fair amount of scope for increasing performance with Mantle, particularly as we’re not yet taking advantage of the Asynchronous Compute queue. This would allow us to take some of our expensive compute shaders – like our Obscurance Fields technique – and schedule them to run in parallel with the rendering of shadow maps, which are particularly light on ALU work.

The improvements should mostly be because of an aggressive resource management done by the engine.

 

[DarkKnightDude]

Their obscurance fields technique is brilliant. Better then other implementations of AO that I've seen.

 

[NTMBK]

Key quote in here is:

Our main goal for supporting Mantle was to take maximum advantage of the potential for multithreading the API calls, and refactor our existing engine rendering pipeline to better fit what we predict are the requirements of this new breed of lightweight APIs. In that respect we spent more time restructuring our engine's rendering architecture than we did writing Mantle-specific code!

Mantle gives them the opportunity to rework their engine architecture today, so when DirectX 12 comes along they are ready. If DX12 supports the same low-level designs then porting should be easy.

 

[3DVagabond]

Key quote in here is:



Mantle gives them the opportunity to rework their engine architecture today, so when DirectX 12 comes along they are ready. If DX12 supports the same low-level designs then porting should be easy.

I really think DX12 is going to be Mantle with access to other companies GPU's tacked on. Hopefully Msft won't weigh it down too much and have it well optimized for all.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

Rebellion has some nice tech going, too bad it's wasted on a game like sniperleet.

 

[ShintaiDK]

I really think DX12 is going to be Mantle with access to other companies GPU's tacked on. Hopefully Msft won't weigh it down too much and have it well optimized for all.

Mantle and DX12 is 2 completely different things. And AMD is the one not being mentioned anywhere in the countless DX12 statements from MS.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/directx/archive/2014/10/01/directx-12-and-windows-10.aspx

 

[caswow]

Mantle and DX12 is 2 completely different things. And AMD is the one not being mentioned anywhere in the countless DX12 statements from MS.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/directx/archive/2014/10/01/directx-12-and-windows-10.aspx

where do you see nvidia mentioned in this blog? neither of them two is mentioned.

 

[Wild Thing]

Mantle and DX12 is 2 completely different things. And AMD is the one not being mentioned anywhere in the countless DX12 statements from MS.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/directx/archive/2014/10/01/directx-12-and-windows-10.aspx

Mantle is available right now...DX12 is lying in the inbox in Redmond...there's a difference.
Seems to work pretty well...
Courtesy of Rebellion's own benchmarks....^_^

 

[96Firebird]

Judging by that chart, they used a driver that doesn't even support the GTX 980 or GTX 970...