DX12 / Vulcan and new GPU architecture (?)

[Sabrewings]

You probably have not programmed enough.
Mantle error handling is the same error handling used in tons of Win32 API, from Direct3D 11 to WioAPI (windows.h).
HRESULT, aka returning an integer for error handling, is a very common low-level error-handling technique. Moreover it was obvious that MS were going to remove a lot of runtime checks. Who wrote that page just made a bad homework, causing an embarrassing result.

At this point it's like wasting your breath. Apparently one page of documentation that was put together in haste is indicative of an entire code base.

On one hand, we have a lot of game devs who make game engines for a living, some of whom are very renown, say Metal, Vulkan and DX12 are similar/deja-vu/variants of Mantle... on the other, a bunch of forum warriors who disregard the evidence and continue to spread fud...

When there is evidence, like actual code, that goes beyond circumstantial, then you would have a leg to stand on here.

One would certainly hope so, else these individuals who think DX12 and Mantle are not similar display a certain lack of logic or just blinded by faith.

As I have said many times, they are similar. Probably as similar as Linux is to Windows from a SDK point of view. However, this nonsense that "DX12 is based off Mantle" as if some code copy and pasting has gone on is pure conjecture to spin a side.

Not sure why you guys bother. Until you're a software engineer responsible for making major game engines, please don't talk against those guys, its disrespectful.

And you shouldn't put words in their mouth. They have all said it's "deja vu" and "similar". I have not seen one developer say DX12 will favor GCN or that DX12 uses Mantle's code.

 

[Silverforce11]

You missed the image I linked in the earlier posts, game devs (people who are building DX12 game engines) have indeed said this: Vulkan, Metal & DX12 are variants of Mantle. It's no coincidence they all come out at similar times. It's deja-vu all over again...

It doesn't need more than 140 words to be clearer.

Now what evidence do you guys have that DX12, unlike Vulkan/Metal, is not built upon Mantle? Have Microsoft publicly deny this? Heck, AMD even publicly touts their leadership in bringing about next-gen APIs, such as Vulkan/Metal & DX12!

 

[railven]

You missed the image I linked in the earlier posts, game devs (people who are building DX12 game engines) have indeed said this: Vulkan, Metal & DX12 are variants of Mantle. It's no coincidence they all come out at similar times. It's deja-vu all over again...

It doesn't need more than 140 words to be clearer.

Now what evidence do you guys have that DX12, unlike Vulkan/Metal, is not built upon Mantle? Have Microsoft publicly deny this? Heck, AMD even publicly touts their leadership in bringing about next-gen APIs, such as Vulkan/Metal & DX12!

You mean the image that contradicted your post and had only one Dev saying it was similar? Because the other guy you highlighted is a blogger.

Yerp, saw it.

 

[Silverforce11]

Its your words against guys that work at AMD, DICE, Lionhead, Epic Games, Crytek etc (there's more on twitter, follow #DX12 & #Mantle for the past year). You must think a lot of yourself @Railven, you seem to know more than these guys with your evidence... oh wait, you have none.

 

[railven]

Its your words against guys that work at AMD, DICE, Lionhead, Epic Games, Crytek etc (there's more on twitter, follow #DX12 & #Mantle for the past year). You must think a lot of yourself @Railven, you seem to know more than these guys with your evidence... oh wait, you have none.

You should stop projecting, I'm not the one making claims. I just noticed you said Johan said "deja-vu" but your actual image showed someone else saying it.

You got a real axe to grind, that much is obvious. You're ready to go all consoles. Hey, that's your prerogative. Just a little whimsical how you constantly attack Nvidia, I do hope DX12 delivers, mostly for your satisfaction. I think you've invested more time and effort that I ever have defending AMD/Radeon and their lackluster results. I guess, I can feel sympathetic to it.

Keep fighting that war. Kudos!

 

[Silverforce11]

It's because you are oblivious to the discussion surrounding Mantle/DX12 for the past years, almost everyone else here has seen the references of Johan publicly saying DX12 is deja vu with Mantle. There's plenty of other devs who say as much on twitter or reddit. You can keep on being in denial, fight the war as you say!

Something for you here, the GDC 2015 Vulkan presentation. Starts of by thanking AMD's Mantle for contributing to Vulkan. Then lists DX12 & Metal as being contributed to as well, in a Vulkan presentation.

https://www.khronos.org/assets/uplo...y/2015-gdc/Valve-Vulkan-Session-GDC_Mar15.pdf

If you wan't to grind the axe then present your own evidence. Else you are just shilling.

ps. This isn't about AMD vs NV like you guys are making it out to be. This is simple you bunch are in denial arguing against industry veterans who have posted re this topic on forums, twitter, reddit, because you guys somehow think you know more than these people... unbelievable arrogance! Do you find it so hard to give credit to AMD for doing something good for all gamers?

 

[railven]

It's because you are oblivious to the discussion surrounding Mantle/DX12 for the past years, almost everyone else here has seen the references of Johan publicly saying DX12 is deja vu with Mantle. There's plenty of other devs who say as much on twitter or reddit. You can keep on being in denial, fight the war as you say!

I'm in denial? Whaaaaaaaaat?

I'd credit Mantle for he DX12 revolution. Sure, we can get into a chicken/egg argument.

As of now I'm excited for DX12 (had no interest in Mantle) and wouldn't hesitate to thank Mantle for it.

Care to take a stab at my position again? By all means, link me to my denial, I'd love to see that.

Something for you here, the GDC 2015 Vulkan presentation. Starts of by thanking AMD's Mantle for contributing to Vulkan. Then lists DX12 & Metal as being contributed to as well.

https://www.khronos.org/assets/uplo...y/2015-gdc/Valve-Vulkan-Session-GDC_Mar15.pdf

Metal, Vulkan, DX12 are variants of Mantle that are improved upon to provide support to more hardware.

I'm well aware of this. But you spend more time thinking everyone is an enemy you already classified me in the wrong position. I never once said Mantle wasn't the precursor. Hell, go back to my quote above and see me defending Mantle. (It's like when I say I have a Radeon bias, people think I'm lying, woof.)

If you wan't to grind the axe then present your own evidence. Else you are just shilling.

Evidence to what? I didn't make a claim. I found your most odd since it was contradicted by the image you said "see, PROOF!" I love it when people resort to accusing another of shilling. I admit, I shill for AMD, I never denied that - not once. It's just odd that now you seem to got an issue with me when I'm rocking an Nvidia card and am actually happy with it. You didn't seem to care who I was when I was towing the AMD tag line, such as this:

I dunno. As a huge hardcore Radeon fanboy, the issues they had fixing their CFX is basically why I left to try the Nvidia side SLI (note they had their own issues which is why I left Multi GPU all together).

I loved my Radeons. The ZeroCore tech was awesome. And of course a driver revision broke it. What good is a bullet point advertisement feature if it doesn't work? I was told it was a beta driver, expect this go back to official WHQL drivers - well yeah, but then I'd be out the new anti-microstutter (frame pacing, forgot the name) feature as a multi GPU user I desperately needed.

AMD might have a good ace in their current driver set. I'm so eager to try them out I'm willing to buy a 290[X]. I've been disappointed with Nvidia's [my opinion] abandonment of Kepler.

But I got over my bitterness, when it came time to upgrade - I weighed my options, and picked. Sorry that didn't tie into your "AMD one to rule them all" mentality. And for the record, I did buy two 290X, ref. Even in a moment of weakness bought 2x Corsair HG10 A1 brackets and was ready to go CFX water cooled since I got a spare H50 and H60. What stopped me was the horrible microstutter in WoW. That's why I left CFX to begin with.

 

[Silverforce11]

So if you agree these newer APIs are an evolution of Mantle, why have you been spamming this thread with such stuff like "I don't trust twitter" in response to those people on twitter saying basically just that...

Edit: Didn't want another thread devolved to AMD v NV.. lets get back to topic, DX12, Vulkan, Async Compute etc..

 

[railven]

So if you agree these newer APIs are an evolution of Mantle, why have you been spamming this thread with such stuff like "I don't trust twitter" in response to those people on twitter saying basically just that...

Temper, temper, man. Spam? I made one post stating how Twitter is a terrible means to communicate. It isn't very reliable, tweets get deleted all the time and unless you archive it you're left with egg on your face, people zero in one one tweet from a conversation of multiple tweets and regurgitate it like it's gospel.

Two posts about me mentioning twitter - but I'm spamming this thread? Hachi machi!

Seriously man, I don't care what hardware you rock, this isn't AMD vs NV. There's heaps of other threads for that.

Sure you don't

This is about DX12/Vulkan.

And twitter, seem you've said it so often in this thread, I just added my two cents on it - but you didn't like that since it didn't jive with your turkey. But, I'll bow out since you are clearly starting to get angry.

 

[Silverforce11]

I think just about every other Mantle, DX12 thread got locked in the past. Time to call it peace.

 

[gamervivek]

The mantle/dx12 documentation comparison has mention of the 'design philosophy' of mantle. If you think it's a generic error checking documentation or even more amusingly that microsoft hit upon the same way to go and miraculously ended up using same words to describe the process then god help you. Gracefully.

http://i169.photobucket.com/albums/u233/Rocketrod6a/Mantle vs DX12 pgm guide.jpg

 

[AnandThenMan]

You should stop projecting, I'm not the one making claims. I just noticed you said Johan said "deja-vu" but your actual image showed someone else saying it.

So what is this then?

 

[Silverforce11]

I just hope it lives up to the hype so we can embrace better multi-GPU scaling & frametimes, as well as enjoy lightning, physics & AA with async compute with minimal performance hits because those features now are some of the most performance killing features in DX11.

 

[railven]

So what is this then?

Another image where Johan didn't say "deja-vu."

 

[3DVagabond]

I just hope it lives up to the hype so we can embrace better multi-GPU scaling & frametimes, as well as enjoy lightning, physics & AA with async compute with minimal performance hits because those features now are some of the most performance killing features in DX11.

Well, it's certainly going to do what Mantle did and more, with the extra refinement and games being designed purely with DX12 rendering paths.

 

[Silverforce11]

Well, it's certainly going to do what Mantle did and more, with the extra refinement and games being designed purely with DX12 rendering paths.

I do have one concern, because of Vulkan can do cross-platform, cross-hardware but it isn't linked with Windows specifically, as devs, why not just make games for Vulkan, why DX12? You could have a Vulkan game running on consoles, Windows, Linux, MAC, mobiles, with very little porting.

MS better be pushing DX12 hard because the threat from an open source Vulkan not tied to one particular OS is major.

 

[3DVagabond]

I do have one concern, because of Vulkan can do cross-platform, cross-hardware but it isn't linked with Windows specifically, as devs, why not just make games for Vulkan, why DX12? You could have a Vulkan game running on consoles, Windows, Linux, MAC, mobiles, with very little porting.

MS better be pushing DX12 hard because the threat from an open source Vulkan not tied to one particular OS is major.

DX12 is likely to have much better tools. The advantage of Vulkan is as you say cross platform. I doubt that will help much with AAA games, but should make games that run on portable and PC very popular with it.

I would love for the API and OS to be completely open. No shenanigans between IHV's or where MSFT is trying to force a new OS down our throats.

 

[Silverforce11]

Yup, if Vulkan can achieve what DX12 does (**), it's the better API since a new OS Windows upgrade won't be required, people on older Windows, Linux, MAC, can enjoy the benefits.

It makes more sense to develop for Vulkan as the audience is wider.

** More info soon@ http://developer.amd.com/community/events/amd-at-gdc-europe-2015/

Vulkan and DirectX®12 share many common concepts, and can offer significant performance boosts, including lower API overhead, full muti-threading support, asynchronous compute, and more, but differ vastly from the APIs most game developers are used to. As a result, developing for DX12 or Vulkan requires a new approach to graphics programming and in many cases a re-design of the Game Engine.

 

[werepossum]

An API is not a magic tool that maximize hardware performance. You - developer - have to maximize your application performance through that tool. APIs like LibGCM, Mantle, Metal, Direct3D 12 and Vulkan are meant to reduce the impact of the API runtime on your application, to reduce the driver background workloads and give you less abstraction as possible to better control the hardware.
Just because you make an #include <d3d12.h> doesn't mean you are going to receive a free performance boost into my application. You are still able to make crap like like this, probably if you are a bad developer you will produce more "things" like that with a low level API.

AMD and DICE did not invented the wheel with Mantle. Mantle simply came out first, it was designed for a limited range of hardware and it was designed to run against WDDM 1.x. It was simple to put it out first. Mantle has a huge credit: it showed first how much limited were Direct3D and OpenGL with current modern hardware and it showed a part of the solution. No-one can deny that.
However, Direct3D 12 is meant to run with a larger range of hardware (which is not an easy challenge), it's meant to run with a new driver model (which required a lot of work by Microsoft), moreover it's meant to work with older and legacy graphics Windows API too (even if that's was not a primary goal though) and add set of new capabilities too (like SM 5.1), and there are the graphics tools. Build Direct3D 12 required a lot of work compared to Mantle. It is obvious that AMD and Dice where able to put it out first.

Intel and NVIDIA hardware do not have any issue caused by WDDM 2.0 and the D3D12 structure. I do not understand where such concerns come from. If we speak about rasterization, Maxwell 2.0 is the most advanced GPU currently on sale, no-one can negate that.

Finally you cannot directly compare the amount of money AMD invested into Mantle to the money Microsoft and it's partners invested into D3D12. There is at least one order of magnitude in difference, maybe two orders of magnitude. AMD itself stated they didn't invest a huge amount of money into mantle. If you wonna find someone that invested a lot of money into mantle it's called EA.

<sigh>
Just in case anyone else has problems understanding this, which doesn't seem to be the case:
Maximizing performance in DX12 /= Magic box that replaces developers.
Maximizing performance in DX12 = Providing developers tools which allow to do the maximum amount of work in the least amount of time, across broad hardware spectra.

Oh, guess I forgot to post last night.

"I didn't imply discredit anyone, I meant be skeptical."

Twitter has proven time and time again to be a terrible avenue to share information. Someone above said it best and the example "I'm your father" is perfect.

People post something quick - spur of the moment then it gets regurgitated and we start playing the telephone game until some site writes an article and it becomes almost dogma.

Good points, and skeptism is always good. Still, at this point I don't think anyone is denying that DX12 is conceptually following Mantle, right? Because my understanding is that DX12 (specifically its CPU/GPU interactions and commands) follows Mantle concepts in showing that low level access across a wide spectrum of hardware is possible, desirable, and practical. Absent Mantle, I believe that DX12 would look a LOT more like DX11 with some new functions.

 

[Alessio1989]

De-ja-vou

https://twitter.com/postgoodism/status/473526169132752896

Did I win something?

This thread is a dead-end anyway. Some people do not understand the differences between introduction manual, implementation, low-level programming concepts.

 

[Headfoot]

The mantle/dx12 documentation comparison has mention of the 'design philosophy' of mantle. If you think it's a generic error checking documentation or even more amusingly that microsoft hit upon the same way to go and miraculously ended up using same words to describe the process then god help you. Gracefully.

http://i169.photobucket.com/albums/u233/Rocketrod6a/Mantle vs DX12 pgm guide.jpg

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink

 

[stahlhart]

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=225737

We do expect all parties to know when enough is enough and to avoid escalating any given situation into a serious public spectacle.

Keep the threads ON TOPIC. Do not derail threads. It would seem the biggest reason for thread derailment is a member getting personal about the opinion of another member.

Discuss the topic, not what you think of a member for having an opinion.

Learn when to say, "When". Agree to disagree. No need for 15 pages of getting nowhere.

This thread fails on all counts.
-- stahlhart