The AMD Mantle Thread

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MeldarthX

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May 8, 2010
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Chris's work speaks for itself - He's about as big as they get; while his new company hasn't put anything out yet; you see the fruits of his work already.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-10-24-stardock-seeds-new-dev-oxide-games

That is Oxide Games - all vets of the industry from good companies building a new game engine...

Seriously Eidos-Montreal given PC couple great games; and lots of love - *they are part of Square; and Square will use mantle for rest of their stuff*

First people were like Mantle is Dice only - now that some other names are starting to come out.....oh doesn't matter its only Chris Robert's he doesn't matter. He only invented the space sim; only has the highest backing on kickstarter and is showing what he's doing along the way...;)

Others; yes new company; building a new engine to *that will be up for licensing* another company/ part of larger publisher. They are only bringing one of the biggest games for next year in Thief 4 ;)

Na; you're right; they don't matter......;)
 
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SirPauly

Diamond Member
Apr 28, 2009
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On Oxide:

New 64-bit Cross Platform 3D Engine Announced by Newly Formed Oxide Games

http://oxidegames.com/press

About The Oxide Team

Dan Baker, Partner. Dan started at Microsoft where he helped design the DirectX 9 standard while working as a key member of the High Level Shading Language Team. He led the technical development of HLSL for DirectX10. While at Firaxis, Dan developed the first multithreaded DirectX 11 3D engine for Civilization V.

Tim Kipp, Partner. Tim has been a technology lead in the game industry for over a decade and has shipped over 15 titles. His experience in architecting multi-core processing was critical in designing and implementing the Nitrous SWARM technology.

Marc Meyer, Partner. Marc is a veteran of the game industry whose expertise in UI design ensures that Nitrous provides a robust user interface feature set for developers. Building on his experience of having built the Civilization V user-interface system from the ground up, Marc is developing tools and systems to enable easy third-party modding and user interface support into Nitrous.

Brian Wade, Partner. Brian has been in the game industry for nearly three decades. As the lead developer of Civilization V, Command and Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath, The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth II: Rise of the Witch-king, Brian is no stranger to the challenges of bringing diverse technologies together.

Brad Wardell, Partner. Brad has two decades of experience in the game industry and is also the CEO of Stardock Corp. Brad programmed the first commercial multithreaded 32-bit PC games in the 1990s. At Oxide, he provides business and management logistics for the company.

Nathan Heazlett, Art Director. Nathan has more than 15 years of software and game development experience as a lead and technical artist for a variety of AAA titles. Nathan’s experience in developing shaders and tools is critical in ensuring that Nitrous provides intuitive support for art asset integration
 

Erazor51

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Jun 25, 2008
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AMD announced today that Cloud Imperium Games, Eidos Montreal and Oxide Games are the latest game developers will be using its latest API, Mantle, in order to optimize the way PC games are developed as a means to ‘extract maximum performance from a modern graphics architecture that spans desktop PCs, notebooks and consumer devices like tablets‘.

Ritche Corpus, director of ISV gaming and alliances, AMD said:

“AMD is proud to play an instrumental role in transforming the world of game development with Mantle. With the support and close collaboration between AMD and industry-leading game developers like Cloud Imperium, Eidos-Montréal and Oxide, Mantle can maximize optimization for highly anticipated PC titles, bringing an unparalleled gaming experience for players.”

Chris Roberts, CEO, Cloud Imperium Games added:

“AMD’s Mantle will allow us to extract more performance from an AMD Radeon GPU than any other graphics API. Mantle is vitally important for a game like Star Citizen, which is being designed with the need for massive GPU horsepower. With Mantle, our team can spend more time achieving our perfect artistic vision, and less time worrying about whether or not today’s gaming hardware will be ready to deliver it.”

David Anfossi, studio head, Eidos-Montreal also added:

“Mantle lets you use AMD Radeon GPUs the way they are meant to be used, unlocking many new opportunities and increased CPU and GPU performance. Because of this, Mantle is one of the most important changes to PC graphics in many years.”

Dan Baker, co-founder, Oxide Games concluded:

“AMD’s Mantle technology lets us get more out of the hardware than any other solution available. Adding Mantle support to our multi-platform, 64-bit Nitrous engine realizes significant gains in performance on Mantle-enabled hardware without adding enormous development overhead.”

Cloud Imperium Games, Eidos-Montreal and Oxide Games will join AMD and DICE in speaking about Mantle architecture and implementation at the AMD Developer Summit (APU 13), running November 11-14 in San Jose, California.

This news basically means that both Star Citizen and THIEF will take advantage of AMD’s newest API. So now we have Battlefield 4 (and every Frostbite 3-powered title), Star Citizen and THIEF (alongside all upoming games from EIDOS Montreal) supporting this new API.

Link: http://www.dsogaming.com/news/amd-m...imperium-eidos-montreal-oxide-will-support-it
 
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Phynaz

Lifer
Mar 13, 2006
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Cool to see developer support coming. That's two AAA teams on board. This could be the start of something big.
 

SiliconWars

Platinum Member
Dec 29, 2012
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Let's have a look at the language being used.

unparalleled gaming experience
massive GPU horsepower
most important changes to PC graphics in many years
significant gains in performance
The language being used should dispel any notion that this is single-digit gains. Understand that AMD has told them they can't give numbers, but they can say it as it is. Are they all crazy enough to be talking it up so much for sub 5% improvement?

That sig will be back to haunt you Phynaz.
 

ShintaiDK

Lifer
Apr 22, 2012
20,378
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Was that it? The "broad support of several developers"? So its still up to DICE to carry the entire Mantle project.
 

96Firebird

Diamond Member
Nov 8, 2010
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Let's have a look at the language being used.

The language being used should dispel any notion that this is single-digit gains. Understand that AMD has told them they can't give numbers, but they can say it as it is. Are they all crazy enough to be talking it up so much for sub 5% improvement?

That sig will be back to haunt you Phynaz.

Those are words straight from AMD themselves. Of course they are going to make it seem like the second coming of Christ. It would concern me if they didn't.

Ever heard of hype?
 

smackababy

Lifer
Oct 30, 2008
27,024
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Let's have a look at the language being used.

The language being used should dispel any notion that this is single-digit gains. Understand that AMD has told them they can't give numbers, but they can say it as it is. Are they all crazy enough to be talking it up so much for sub 5% improvement?

That sig will be back to haunt you Phynaz.

So, if going by language, the games made by those developers are going to fail. They talk about needing those gains for their games, so rather than optimizing their code for 100% of systems, they are choosing instead to optimize them for 10% of them... yeah, good job!
 

SiliconWars

Platinum Member
Dec 29, 2012
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Those are words straight from AMD themselves. Of course they are going to make it seem like the second coming of Christ. It would concern me if they didn't.

Ever heard of hype?

Uh, last I knew...

Chris Roberts, CEO, Cloud Imperium Games
David Anfossi, studio head, Eidos-Montreal
Dan Baker, co-founder, Oxide Games

...are not from AMD.

In what way?

In that the 290X already is some 20% faster than a single Titan in BF4 without Mantle being applied, and will probably beat SLI Titan after the Mantle patch. That's at the same settings of course.
 

SimianR

Senior member
Mar 10, 2011
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Was that it? The "broad support of several developers"? So its still up to DICE to carry the entire Mantle project.

I would consider DICE and Eidos a pretty good start actually. If Eidos is on board with Mantle then hopefully we'll see Mantle support in Thief and the Deux Ex: Human Revolution sequel (and anything else they are developing).

In that the 290X already is some 20% faster than a single Titan in BF4 without Mantle being applied, and will probably beat SLI Titan after the Mantle patch. That's at the same settings of course.

I'm expecting some pretty huge gains from Mantle - but this just seems unrealistic to me.
 

Teizo

Golden Member
Oct 28, 2010
1,271
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In that the 290X already is some 20% faster than a single Titan in BF4 without Mantle being applied, and will probably beat SLI Titan after the Mantle patch. That's at the same settings of course.

So you have softened your stance to say 'probably' now?

What changed?
 

96Firebird

Diamond Member
Nov 8, 2010
5,709
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Uh, last I knew...

Chris Roberts, CEO, Cloud Imperium Games
David Anfossi, studio head, Eidos-Montreal
Dan Baker, co-founder, Oxide Games

...are not from AMD.

Ok, let me rephrase.

Those are words straight from people who will benefit from the hype themselves. Of course they are going to make it seem like the second coming of Christ. It would concern me if they didn't.

Ever heard of hype?
 

SiliconWars

Platinum Member
Dec 29, 2012
2,346
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So you have softened your stance to say 'probably' now?

What changed?

Nothing changed, it's just that I'm sure if SLI Titan was 5% faster you'd be claiming it as a victory and I was somehow "wrong".

Let's see how many of you are sticking to your "3% faster" after the current round of plaudits from industry veterans.
 

SiliconWars

Platinum Member
Dec 29, 2012
2,346
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Ok, let me rephrase.

Those are words straight from people who will benefit from the hype themselves. Of course they are going to make it seem like the second coming of Christ. It would concern me if they didn't.

Ever heard of hype?

In what way are the benefiting from the hype?

Let's say you're correct though and it's all about the hype - in that case it'll just be a matter of time before everybody is doing it, right? Activision, Ubisoft et al will all be joining in on the "hype" soon?
 

96Firebird

Diamond Member
Nov 8, 2010
5,709
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In what way are the benefiting from the hype?

They are in the business of selling games. How is saying a game will perform well not benefiting from the hype?

Let's say you're correct though and it's all about the hype - in that case it'll just be a matter of time before everybody is doing it, right? Activision, Ubisoft et al will all be joining in on the "hype" soon?

Or they will wait for actual results and not fall into the hype.

Is it really that hard to understand? :confused:
 

SiliconWars

Platinum Member
Dec 29, 2012
2,346
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You're making no sense. If there is some kind of gain to be got out of hyping Mantle then they would all be doing it because there would be nothing to lose?

You can't actually believe that AMD doesn't already have working examples of the gains that can be had. All the big devs know what it is capable of.
 

ams23

Senior member
Feb 18, 2013
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Well we know that there will not be a single Unreal Engine 4 (or Unreal Engine 3) game with with "Mantle" support. We also know that for a game to simply "support" an API doesn't mean that it will make very optimal use of it, which is why AMD will need to pay developers to spend extra time optimizing for it. At this point, hyping it based on pre-conceived notions of perf. deltas makes zero sense because not a single perf. data point exists in public. We will just have to wait and see what Mantle brings to the table, and what NV's driver team does to optimize perf. in these game titles.
 

wand3r3r

Diamond Member
May 16, 2008
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It might not be the drain some claim it will be. It sounds like some are happy to support mantle. Isn't unreal made by the NV sponsored company anyway, why would they support it, isn't that why they already get paid? Why would you judge mantle on an engine that doesn't support it?

Oxide Games announced today that its recently revealed 3D engine, Nitrous, supports AMD’s Mantle technology. Nitrous, designed specifically for the hardware now common in PCs as well as the Sony PlayStation® 4™ and Microsoft’s Xbox® One™, is capable of simulating and rendering large-scale, complex scenes thanks to its 64-bit architecture and fully concurrent multi-core processing. Those visuals are even better on Mantle-enabled hardware like AMD’s Radeon™ R9, R7, and HD 7000 Series graphics cards.

....

“Mantle solves a problem PC developers have struggled with for years,” said Oxide co-founder Tim Kipp. “We’re closer to the graphics hardware than ever before, which lets us see dramatic increases in performance on Mantle-enabled systems. At the same time, the low cost of including Mantle support doesn’t prevent us from developing Nitrous for all modern graphics hardware, which makes it attractive to us as businesspeople.”

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

ams23

Senior member
Feb 18, 2013
907
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The proof is in the pudding, not in marketing or promotional statements. Like I said earlier, wait and see. Anyway, most game developers still must spend the majority of their time and effort optimizing for industry standard graphics API's such as DirectX and OpenGL, and the expectation is that these industry standard API's will evolve and improve over time to take better advantage of newer hardware features such as unified virtual memory.
 
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HurleyBird

Platinum Member
Apr 22, 2003
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Star Citizen using Mantle more or less confirms that support will be built in to Cryengine as well.
 

chimaxi83

Diamond Member
May 18, 2003
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It's always funny to see that the Mantle negativity consistently comes from the same core group of AMD bashers. Why not keep open minds? I'm not getting my hopes up, but at the same time, I look forward to the possibilities. I guess you need the capability of being unbiased.
 

krumme

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 2009
5,952
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Well we know that there will not be a single Unreal Engine 4 (or Unreal Engine 3) game with with "Mantle" support. We also know that for a game to simply "support" an API doesn't mean that it will make very optimal use of it, which is why AMD will need to pay developers to spend extra time optimizing for it. At this point, hyping it based on pre-conceived notions of perf. deltas makes zero sense because not a single perf. data point exists in public. We will just have to wait and see what Mantle brings to the table, and what NV's driver team does to optimize perf. in these game titles.

Yes and the developers will not spend money on tuning for nv cards. Nv will have to pay for each and every single game while amd can use the mantle approach for all. Look at this at distance its simply inefficient the way it used to be. All the fragmentation on hardware led to expensive programming, expensive and ugly ports, and bad utility of the hardware.

If the game is portet to pc and thereby more or less automaticly supports gcn the developers have done what they need to do. Amd will have to do next to nothing compared to before. While nv faces the usual high cost and bad utility of their hardware.
 
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