The AMD Mantle Thread

[Silverforce11]

No penetration at all, its dead on arrival.. or close to dying.. or slowly dying.. or...

Why so pessimistic? What is your reason, given you have NO EVIDENCE, for the pessimism? On the contrary, you have a summit where multiple developers are praising it endlessly, you know, guys who actually make games for a living as opposed to forum warriors like you or I.

I have made this question prior, but none of you people answered. Here I present it again, why are you guys so adamant it will fail?

Do you happen to know the secret source code and its effects on games? No, don't think so. Why assume its going to be awful? It's a pretty bold assumption too.. given so many developers are jumping onboard. They all must love to waste their time and $$ on a useless endeavour..

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Right because we've never seen exclusive things falter and die or become only small niche occurrences where only a handful of games a year use it.

We have 50 years of history that says otherwise, what's your reason for optimism?

 

[DarkKnightDude]

Essentially we won't know till December patch for BF4, even then, that's only one game. Gotta wait for Thief, star citizen or dozen other frostbite games, and who knows what devs are going to have mantle.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

This would make Mantle interesting.

 

[Minkoff]

Right because we've never seen exclusive things falter and die or become only small niche occurrences where only a handful of games a year use it.

We have 50 years of history that says otherwise, what's your reason for optimism?

I believe you're somewhat wrong.
Recent history shows that it is possible to make a hard entry in an even crowdier market. All you need is a killer product...just like Apple. And many more....including AMD back in the days.
And I really hate to repeat it so many times but everything a company does is to increase a market share and technology adoption! You just need the product that can show the customer what he will recieve not only today, but in the future

 

[Silverforce11]

What's your reason for optimism?

DICE, Crytek, Activision, Square Enix.. and more. I was already optimistic, but now with the Unreal Engine supporting Mantle..

Those are reasons enough.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

DICE, Crytek, Activision, Square Enix, Unreal Engine.. and more.

Those are reasons enough.

Looks like you're driving down the same path that AMD is but in opposite directions.

 

[Silverforce11]

Didn't you guys use Frostbite 3 only excuse awhile ago? Now its in every major game engine moving forward, from triple A developers to the small Indy..

Really cannot see the positivity with all that?

 

[Imouto]

Yes PC RTS and MMOs will benefit the most, problem is GCN market share is just a fraction of the overall market.

So if you build an MMO around Mantle, you have a very tiny user base to extract money from. If you build it around DX9 (a joke, but that is where we are with DX9 hardware holding everything back), obtain poor performance, then also offer the same version, but with Mantle support and thus more performance what benefit is that to the game studio?

Mantle does what we need, but what we need is Mantle for all hardware, not just one fraction of the market. But that goes against what Mantle is, which is a hardware specific API. The reason it works so well for GCN is because it doesn't work for Intel or Nvidia, or 6xxx series or later. It is meant only for but a fraction of an overall market, what kind of penetration can we actually expect with such a grossly limited scope of market this benefits?

If they work with DirectX 9 is because it's cheaper and they can't afford to task the user hardware even more. If Mantle is as easy to implement as Oxide says I don't see why MMORPG makers wouldn't go for it and avoid an endless influx of threads about how bad your game is running on every single hardware configuration.

People go to forums and actually buy the hardware other ppl recommend. I've seen it forever with Lineage II, Aion, WoW, TERA Online, FFXIV and others. It's been always Intel + Nvidia and they were right, that combo worked like a charm for obvious reasons.

Crytek is pushing its engine and Epic Games can't stay put when their target developers could make their games run way better with another engine. And this happens with a lot of engines like Chrome Engine doing really fine.

 

[psoomah]

It'll help I imagine, but it looks like Mantle likes moar cores. So, i7's might actually show a marked enough advantage to actually get people to buy the more expensive CPU's

Mantle is so effective at utilizing CPU cores, an FX 8350 was down clocked to 2 Ghz with no hit to the draw calls or game performance, so it's the exact opposite. Cheap AMD CPUs and APUs will be competitive with expensive Intel CPUs.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

If they work with DirectX 9 is because it's cheaper and they can't afford to task the user hardware even more.

They go DX9 because of the market share it holds.

Mantle is so effective at utilizing CPU cores, an FX 8350 was down clocked to 2 Ghz with no hit to the draw calls or game performance, so it's the exact opposite. Cheap AMD CPUs and APUs will be competitive with expensive Intel CPUs.

That's not what the slide said.

Cheap AMD APUs will still be bound by lower draw call potential, this doesn't change that. Same as the 2GHz 8350, simply put the draw call demand they imposed wasn't significant enough to reduce the performance of their 290. That doesn't mean they can't with more draw calls.

 

[Silverforce11]

Mantle is so effective at utilizing CPU cores, an FX 8350 was down clocked to 2 Ghz with no hit to the draw calls or game performance, so it's the exact opposite. Cheap AMD CPUs and APUs will be competitive with expensive Intel CPUs.

It will be both. It depends on scalability in game engines to cater to the vastly different hardware.

Remember, whatever helps multi-core CPUs will help Intel just as much. Their core vs core is stronger than AMD by far.

 

[96Firebird]

Damn, I was hoping for solid performance figures during the conference... More waiting I guess.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Damn, I was hoping for solid performance figures during the conference... More waiting I guess.

They are giving performance figures, they're just all tied to the CPU.

 

[96Firebird]

Oh, I guess I missed those with all the bickering going on.

Not in the market for a new CPU, but would like to see some GPU comparisons (DX11 vs. Mantle on a 290(X) and the like). Not sure how much longer I can play BF4 on my GTX 460, averaging 25FPS on some levels!

 

[Imouto]

They go DX9 because of the market share it holds.

No, just no.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

 

[Meekers]

Ryan Shrout - "Oxide claims that it only took 2 "man months" to support Mantle. "Not much work or expensive" to integrate it."

"API overhead reduced by at least 10x. In some cases StarSwarm is 3x faster with Mantle."

"Completely changes the landscape for multi-core. Claims an FX-8350 is now just as fast as a Core i7-4770K"

James Prior - "With Mantle, an @AMDFX 8350 underclocked to 2GHZ, the game is still GPU bound on a R9 290X - no loss in frame rate"

I would call that some staggering info.

For those that did not see some of the performance claims.

 

[psoomah]

Bottom line is Mantle is what developers have been wanting for years and AMD being inclusionary and committing to an SDK and releasing it as an open standard makes it more attractive. Oxide indicating integrating it with an engine will be low cost and including a Mantle path in games even more low cost make it even more attractive. From a competitive point of view, all but impossibly attractive.

All indications point to a very wide industry adoption.

If Nvidia spurns Mantle and tries to impede it with the developers fully aware Nvidia is free to join Mantle and get most of the performance benefits while essentially getting a free ride at AMD's expense while doing so, they will view it as a total dick move by JHH. Why then would they have any incentive to continue working with Nvidia? Nvidia would see a lot of it's developer relationships turning frosty. It would be a lose, lose, lose situation for Nvidia.

I see it as AMD making Nvidia an offer it can't refuse. Would Nvidia be able to take advantage of Mantle before the 2014 holiday season? Probably not, but as long as it's good for 2015 and beyond it's still in the game and there IS a price to pay for losing all the consoles to AMD.

If Nvidia decides to support Mantle, and then do the honorable thing and make Gsync an open standard, there will be happy happy developers and good times for all!!

 

[tonyfreak215]

The amount of hype coming from these developers leads me to believe that Mantle is going to be awesome...

Really, since there are only 3 GPU vendors these days, it wouldn't be impossible to just have 3 low level api's. Not like back when Glide was around and there were twice as many GPU companies.

Whos to say there needs to be 3 low levels? Hell might freeze over and Itel and NV could adopt Mantle. Looks like AMD has already extended their hand; lets see if NV and Intel take it.

Just because something is technically superior does not mean it will prevail in the marketplace. Sweeney is apparently deep in bed with NVidia and he also controls Unreal, one of the, if not THE most popular game engine out there. It was unreal how much he kept talking about Nvidia, Nvidia, Nvidia throughout the entire talk. You've got to get people like him on board. I'm not sure AMD has enough clout to do that.

I think eventually he will cave. He'll have to. When Mantle kicks off and is supported by vast majority of engines, he'll have no choice.

 

[krumme]

Whos to say there needs to be 3 low levels? Hell might freeze over and Itel and NV could adopt Mantle. Looks like AMD has already extended their hand; lets see if NV and Intel take it.

Mantle is working - and ONLY working because of the consoles. There will not be 3 low level API. Who will pay for that nonsense? The dev. will not like to write the new frostbite4 engine to Intel Iris pro-pro-pro shitty gfx? Impossible. Or Nvidia 10-15% of the gaming market? - far worse ROI than a simple mantle port.

It just makes no sense. Its a done deal. The race is over.
What matters now is the race for AVX2/AVX3 vs. HSA support.

I think eventually he will cave. He'll have to. When Mantle kicks off and is supported by vast majority of engines, he'll have no choice.

He already have. Its comming in the new engine. He wants to sell new stellar games for the new consoles right? - doing so will make it straight forward to use mantle. Not doing is losing market share to eg. EA games. And he dont want that.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

No, just no.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

What am I supposed to be looking at?

Every card that does 10 and/or 11 does 9.

1/4th of steams user base doesn't have DX11, almost 100% has DX9.

 

[tonyfreak215]

That's how this whole thread has been. I have been the sole source of hard logic this entire time and I made sure to even leave the thread for a week.

Would prefer you to leave it permanently. All you ever do is talk down in it.

Warning issued for personal attack.
-- stahlhart

 

[psoomah]

Yes. Unless the specification is done (actually finished for release fully documented) by the time that the game comes out, that's the way it has to be, as DICE's technical team literally wrote (and is in the process of writing) most of it.

"Built by AMD in close collaboration with us at DICE/EA." http://www.slideshare.net/DICEStudio/battlefield-4-frostbite-3-mantle

AMD was the lead in building Mantle into Frostbite.

 

[krumme]

What am I supposed to be looking at?

Every card that does 10 and/or 11 does 9.

1/4th of steams user base doesn't have DX11, almost 100% has DX9.

I have a hard time understanding what your are trying to say with your post.

How relevant is dx9 and dx10 for developers and the new engines?

Only dx11 support is interesting, and as you say its still a minority?

Games for the new consoles is a huge market and only growing. But you know that.

Why should developers code for a minor market?

Yet you still write like the consoles does not exist, and i am pretty sure you know they do.

What is it???

 

[Spjut]

What am I supposed to be looking at?

Every card that does 10 and/or 11 does 9.

1/4th of steams user base doesn't have DX11, almost 100% has DX9.

Not to mention that it took very long for XP to lose marketshare. We've had plenty of games that do require DX10 cards, but still only use DX9, even games that are/were PC exclusives. For example The Witcher 2 and Planetside 2.


One great thing with Mantle is that it seems everything will be available on Windows 7 as well.