Oxide's SWARM to work on Haswell/Maxwell, Thoughts?

[OCGuy]

During the demo of Oxide/AMD's Nitrous+Mantle engine a week or so ago, the press was shown thousands of objects rendering on screen. Back in October, Oxide said that was possible due to the engine taking advantage of SWARM (Simultaneous Work and Rendering Model), and that it was a "64-bit" engine.

What makes Nitrous unique is its support for Simultaneous Work and Rendering Model (SWARM). Specifically, the engine renders calls automatically from whatever CPU core is most available. This allows for a vastly larger number of high-fidelity 3D objects to be rendered to the screen at the same time.

Then they go on to state that they have been working with AMD, Intel, and NVidia, and that not only R9, but Haswell will be able to take full advantage of SWARM:

The Nitrous engine has made great progress on the fundamental substrate for parallel compute in PC games. Their tasking system shows near-linear scaling across Intel’s high-end desktop PCs, which translates into players being able to control an unprecedented 10,000 interactive units in their engine,” said Mike Burrows, principal engineer and technical director for visual computing engineering at Intel® Corporation.

And Nvidia chimed in as well:

Our existing and upcoming GPU architectures, such as Maxwell, fully leverage the memory capabilities of today’s PCs,” said Ashutosh Rege, vice president, game content & technology at Nvidia. “Nitrous, having been designed with 64-bit gaming in mind from the start, should be able to deliver games with an amazing level of detail across entire scenes of incredible scale.

http://www.oxidegames.com/press/announcement



So what are the benefits of SWARM/Nitrous on Intel/NV versus Mantle + SWARM on AMD hardware? Oxide didn't announce Mantle support until November 4th, and it sounds like they accomplish very similar things regarding CPU scaling.

 

[bystander36]

It sounds like a good thing. It has always been possible to do these things, it just wasn't practical/valuable enough to do it.

They probably saw the 8 cores on consoles, and decided it was time to invest in this type of engine.

Mantle just makes it easier for specific hardware.

 

[blastingcap]

During the demo of Oxide/AMD's Nitrous+Mantle engine a week or so ago, the press was shown thousands of objects rendering on screen. Back in October, Oxide said that was possible due to the engine taking advantage of SWARM (Simultaneous Work and Rendering Model), and that it was a "64-bit" engine.






Then they go on to state that they have been working with AMD, Intel, and NVidia, and that not only R9, but Haswell will be able to take full advantage of SWARM:



And Nvidia chimed in as well:



http://www.oxidegames.com/press/announcement



So what are the benefits of SWARM/Nitrous on Intel/NV versus Mantle + SWARM on AMD hardware? Oxide didn't announce Mantle support until November 4th, and it sounds like they accomplish very similar things regarding CPU scaling.

Doesn't this thread circumvent the lockdown on the current Mantle thread? The press release from October 23, 2013, so it's not new information.

Yes, it does. Good call.
-ViRGE

 

[OCGuy]

Do you have an opinion or information on what performance benefits Oxide's Nitrous/SWARM brings to the table independent of Mantle? This has nothing to do with Mantle's release or delay, which is why Intel, Oxide, and Nvidia were quoted.