The AMD Mantle Thread

[Cloudfire777]

The answer to this really comes down to money, plain and simple. Once a game is released, the majority of programmers are laid off and the lucky ones switch projects. There is a very small budget dedicated to maintenance releases and sustainment. That is nowhere near enough to do a completely new build with the Mantle API.

Also, the API isn't finished. Once AMD actually releases it, we might see some companies pick it up as an afterthought, patch it in, and let people see the differences. AMD approached teams that are currently in development and gave resources to add this in, while helping make the API past alpha.

It hasn't even hit beta yet (which would mean it was close to feature complete).

All good points but I am willing to bet that AMD pays DICE for using Mantle. The game will serve as an inderectly advertising for GCN graphic cards, it surely takes up a lot of manpower from both DICE which have to be paid. I dont believe for a second that DICE is doing this out of their own curiosity and do it for free. There have to be some agreements here between AMD and DICE we dont know of.
They sure picked a wrong game to showcase it on considering all the ingame bugs 😛

I`d like to see a link stating Mantle is in Alpha or even Beta. I mean, the way the API works have been used countless times on consoles over many years. Its just optimizing hardware with software. I`m also thinking that AMD worked along with Sony for many years using a similar API to squeeze out most performance out of the custom APU thats in the PS4.

Mantle should theoretically be finished. They might encounter problems on PCs, but PS4 and PC are fundmentally the same, with a few UMA tweaks on the PS4.

All I could find with a quick google search was a game from Oxide was in the alpha state. Not the API.

 

[smackababy]

But who really cares what they said, it will get here when it gets here. Considering the state BF4 was released in, and the state it still is in, I am kinda glad it has been pushed back a bit.

Have you actually played BF4? I am just wondering because I see quite a lot of the "BF4 is so broken" stuff, yet I have had very few problems (on both NV and AMD cards) with the game. In fact, almost all of my problems were from the first or two.

 

[Cloudfire777]

Also consider this scenario:

Starcraft 3 is being worked on. Blizzard consentrate on developing the game with DX first because it will reach a far greater audience: Nvidia cards, Intel IGPs, pre GCN cards from AMD.

Blizzard state that they recieved some money and support from AMDs software team and will begin to work on Mantle support since the majority of DX is finished within the game. Mantle have been finished many years ago and devs know how to code with it. Because of this they are able to code the game pretty fast.

Starcraft 3 releases. First only with DX support while AMD and Blizzard work on a patch that will enable Mantle a month later.

GCN owners that can use Mantle get restless because they just have to play the game. It gets 10/10 from multiple reviewer sites. Forums are sharing their positivity about it. GCN owners say "screw it" and buys the game and play with DX instead. A week later they finish the game. They ask themselves "Whats the point in waiting for Mantle if it only gives 10-15% more FPS. Or 70FPS instead of 60FPS"?

Mantle slowly fizzles out. It lose support along the game developers. It takes too much time and it costs extra money to hire more guys to code with Mantle. Plus the players seem to buy the game before Mantle is ready. "Why bother?"

 

[KingFatty]

Also consider this scenario:

Starcraft 3 is being worked on. Blizzard consentrate on developing the game with DX first because it will reach a far greater audience: Nvidia cards, Intel IGPs, pre GCN cards from AMD.

Blizzard state that they recieved some money and support from AMDs software team and will begin to work on Mantle support since the majority of DX is finished within the game. Mantle have been finished many years ago and devs know how to code with it. Because of this they are able to code the game pretty fast.

Starcraft 3 releases. First only with DX support while AMD and Blizzard work on a patch that will enable Mantle a month later.

GCN owners that can use Mantle get restless because they just have to play the game. It gets 10/10 from multiple reviewer sites. Forums are sharing their positivity about it. GCN owners say "screw it" and buys the game and play with DX instead. A week later they finish the game. They ask themselves "Whats the point in waiting for Mantle if it only gives 10-15% more FPS. Or 70FPS instead of 60FPS"?

Mantle slowly fizzles out. It lose support along the game developers. It takes too much time and it costs extra money to hire more guys to code with Mantle. Plus the players seem to buy the game before Mantle is ready. "Why bother?"

Just to confirm, this scenario you mention is completely imaginary/hypothetical? There is no Starcraft 3 or anything, and you are totally speculating this entire story?

 

[bystander36]

Just to confirm, this scenario you mention is completely imaginary/hypothetical? There is no Starcraft 3 or anything, and you are totally speculating this entire story?

This is more of a speculation of what would happen if games near end of development decide to add in Mantle. This is not for games built with Mantle in mind.

 

[Cloudfire777]

Just to confirm, this scenario you mention is completely imaginary/hypothetical? There is no Starcraft 3 or anything, and you are totally speculating this entire story?

Hypothetical of course.
Kinda like Battlefield 4 now but just being able to code Mantle on Starcraft 3 much faster.

The problem would solve itself if they could work on Mantle and DX at the same time, but those who develop games have a time limit due to investors/competition/goals etc, some might have to wait until DX is done because working on Mantle and DX at the same means game progress takes longer time. Or else, someone will have to pay for the extra manpower to not slow down the development of the game. That would be AMD since Nvidia concentrated on DX and OpenGL instead while Intel refused to pay royality to AMD to license the API.
Since DX is used by Nvidia, Intel IGP systems, pre GCN GPUs, many game studios may even concentrate on DX first to reach bigger audience and to be able to release the game to pay the guys working on the games, plus pay investors and to meet deadlines. Then start working on Mantle. Or somewhere in between like the scenario I posted about Starcraft 3.

 

[Grooveriding]

Just to confirm, this scenario you mention is completely imaginary/hypothetical? There is no Starcraft 3 or anything, and you are totally speculating this entire story?

Lol, I thought the same. Just a random fairy tale of concocted nonsense with zero relevance.

Hey guys, Mantle kills babies and causes cancer ? It's got be bad, right ? Lol, ridiculous. Just wait for the release and benchmarks.

 

[MutantGith]

But who really cares what they said, it will get here when it gets here. Considering the state BF4 was released in, and the state it still is in, I am kinda glad it has been pushed back a bit.

The thing is, I kind of expect people who say things, especially when they are intended to influence other people, to actually mean what they say.

That twitter exchange in the inline image is an excellent example. Someone was looking for advice when thinking about buying what sounds like a relatively heavy duty (expensive) laptop. That person was given a time that the benchmarks were supposed to be out. They weren't, nor were they out the next two or three times the date was slid. That sort of thing is going to have an impact, or at least it should.

Getting to the point where we're so jaded about misinformation that we can just dismiss it as par for the course sort of flies in the face of trying to be critical, technically minded people.

 

[moonbogg]

Lol, I thought the same. Just a random fairy tale of concocted nonsense with zero relevance.

Hey guys, Mantle kills babies and causes cancer ? It's got be bad, right ? Lol, ridiculous. Just wait for the release and benchmarks.

Well, Mantle does harm gamers actually. I think its clear that the suspense is killing us. YOU LIKE DEH JOKE?

 

[Paul98]

Have you actually played BF4? I am just wondering because I see quite a lot of the "BF4 is so broken" stuff, yet I have had very few problems (on both NV and AMD cards) with the game. In fact, almost all of my problems were from the first or two.

yeah, I don't have to many problems myself ether other than the basic bugs that are in it. But there are still lots with frame rate problems, or memory leak. But there are still basic problems such as when head glitching and getting shot causing player to drop his head making it unable to shot at while you are still able to shoot them. Or the net update rate causing rather large delay in what you see vs what the other person sees. This causes the person walking around a corner a huge advantage, they can shoot and kill someone before that person even sees them. Black spawn screen allowing you to die before you have anything you can see on your screen. Then there is the hit reg that can go completely random, one round every round you shoot hits to being able to empty an entire clip with having no or almost no bullets hit.

 

[Gloomy]

My only remaining problem with BF4 is the Z-Fighting. I'm not sure it can ever be fixed though...

 

[ASM-coder]

Yeah. When you say "In this month: this event", I generally don't think you mean "maybe in this month this will happen, if we can find it in our hearts to make it so."

My opinion is that Dice had every intention of releasing the Mantle patch in December, otherwise this so called intentional deception borders on collusion. AMD, Dice and EA would all need to be party to such a deception, and I think the number one question is "Who Benefits?"

AMD? Sure, they probably sold some cards in anticipation.
EA? I doubt anyone jumped on buying BF4 because of Mantle.
Dice? No way. It looks really bad for them. Why Johan come out in so
many forums, speak so highly of Mantle, if he knew it was no
where near ready?

Common sense says that all 3 companies wouldn't be a party to such a lie. The more likely answer is that the bugs in BF4 delayed the release of the Mantle patch, and many others have already stated this. Sorry to burst the "evil AMD" bubble. It just doesn't wash.

 

[OCGuy]

Game developers are surely watching, and this does not play well to "makes porting games fast and easy."

Game studios aren't going to be budgeting all of this extra time for an unnecessary feature.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

Game developers are surely watching, and this does not play well to "makes porting games fast and easy."

Game studios aren't going to be budgeting all of this extra time for an unnecessary feature.

Of course you know its unnecessary because of all the games you have used it with.

Like others have said. AMD had no idea bf4 was going to be a disaster when they held that press conference. Anyone who claims bf4 has no problems right now has very low standards.

 

[ASM-coder]

Game developers are surely watching, and this does not play well to "makes porting games fast and easy."

Game studios aren't going to be budgeting all of this extra time for an unnecessary feature.

Perhaps game studios will pay attention to how well it performs in BF4, and then
watch the Thief release and see how that goes.
If Thief is delayed or has problems with Mantle, then maybe you guys will get your wish.

 

[MutantGith]

My opinion is that Dice had every intention of releasing the Mantle patch in December, otherwise this so called intentional deception borders on collusion. AMD, Dice and EA would all need to be party to such a deception, and I think the number one question is "Who Benefits?"

AMD? Sure, they probably sold some cards in anticipation.
EA? I doubt anyone jumped on buying BF4 because of Mantle.
Dice? No way. It looks really bad for them. Why Johan come out in so
many forums, speak so highly of Mantle, if he knew it was no
where near ready?

Common sense says that all 3 companies wouldn't be a party to such a lie. The more likely answer is that the bugs in BF4 delayed the release of the Mantle patch, and many others have already stated this. Sorry to burst the "evil AMD" bubble. It just doesn't wash.

I'm certainly not suggesting there is some sort of conspiracy, and I'm not sure exactly if anyone else is, though they can feel free to describe their logic though. My issue is that the alternatives aren't all that much more appealing.

If we take it as a given that Johan wouldn't go around touting the value of this new API and its probable release if he didn't think it was ready, what does that leave us with. Either he really thought it was ready to go based on something that he had been told by the people doing the development (in this case, probably a significant number of people at AMD), or he had no comprehension of how much work really was going to be necessary or at least no idea how many people he was going to have to pull off of other projects in order to squash bugs on Battlefield.

Either way we, as the public, are being given claims about the incredible ease of use and speed of porting builds from some entity (either DICE or AMD - or more likely a combination of the two) that seems to have little idea how to accurately estimate the amount of work this coding actually takes.

It seems like more than anything else, this is a great example of why claims that a 50% increase in frame rates can be had with little or no work or trade-off should be examined very carefully. I'm not going to attempt to figure out if hubris, shortsightedness, extreme excitement, or just poor project management (or any other combination of factors) is the real reason for these problems. In the end, the motivation isn't super important to the technology. However, the process by which that tech is rolled out is (to me) interesting, and illustrative.

 

[ASM-coder]

I'm certainly not suggesting there is some sort of conspiracy, and I'm not sure exactly if anyone else is, though they can feel free to describe their logic though.

I'm not saying that anyone suggested that. But many are suggesting that AMD knew it wasn't ready but marketed it anyway,
and I AM saying that makes no sense unless all three(AMD, Dice and EA) conspired.

Either he really thought it was ready to go based on something that he had been told by the people doing the development (in this case, probably a significant number of people at AMD), or he had no comprehension of how much work really was going to be necessary or at least no idea how many people he was going to have to pull off of other projects in order to squash bugs on Battlefield.

Or, Mantle is ready to go, but it would look bad to release the Mantle patch while the base product is still in flux.

Edit: And I thought I heard that a very small team worked on Mantle, including himself.

Edit2: Any of you guys that have worked on code, on big projects, will know the nature of bugs.
You can test for months, you can QA for months, you can send out Beta releases, you can
early ship to controlled sites. But when it goes GA, the bugs still show up. Somehow
managers are shocked. I have debugged code that has been running for years, and still hit
"day one" bugs.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

Its simple everyone. AMD does not want crashing and gameplay issues associated with mantle. Once bf4 is stable mantle will be released.

 

[ViRGE]

The API itself is pretty much done isn`t it?
Its more the fact that their Mantle showcase, aka Battlefield 4, which likely have all AMDs attention with many working on it, still haven`t got the Patch that enables the API ingame. How much extra time will Mantle require to be enabled in future games?

Even if they could chop it down to 1-2 month after initial release for DX, it will work as a disadvantage for Mantle. Who would want to wait 1-2-3-4 months for a 10% increase in FPS?

Isn't it premature to assume that the holdup on BF4 is developing the Mantle renderer? Especially at a time when we know that DICE is in the middle of a massive bughunt?

I think AT laid out a pretty good explanation in their latest article on the subject. (Emphasis mine)

With that said, while Electronic Arts’ statement is unfortunately (but not unexpectedly) light on details, given the compartmentalized development of modern engines and the bugs facing Battlefield 4 we have good reason to believe that Mantle development itself has only been minimally impeded (if affected at all) since the bulk of BF4’s issues are not in the rendering engine. Instead it’s far more likely that DICE and EA’s QA teams are tied up finding bugs and testing fixes, which would require delaying the Mantle update due to a lack of resources to validate it.

 

[OCGuy]

I haven't crashed in weeks. Why not let me use Mantle on my 290? Those who still have issues will still be in the exact same place they are anyway.

I think we can all be just about done with this part of the Mantle saga anyway. The initial drivers are the 14.1 Betas, and AMD has a history of launching the previous month's betas at the very beginning of the next month....first week of February is my guess.

 

[MutantGith]

All of those are definitely good points.

All of them also highlight the difficulties that are going to magnify when any company now has to try and support an additional code path. To pretend that the amount of support and bug checking is going to go down doesn't seem honest.

And i also totally get that code has a unique ability to seemingly mutate once released and expose all sorts of bugs that never get fully caught, with nearly any QA procedure. To me, were I to be in a position to start making really aggressive claims about the impact a product I was working on was going to have on all of PC gaming going forward, I'd be way more cautious about making sure that I had a product that could release in a reasonable amount of time with a limited amount of bugs. I can't imagine that this process just started a short time before the first reveal in Hawaii. It could easily have been downplayed, and more details slowly released in a more measured manner closer to gold worth code. This announcement was more dramatic, but not, as it seems, as reliable.

The fact that everything else (API release, Oxide, more details about programming, hardware requirements) has seemingly been put on hold till the BF4 Mantle patch rolls is interesting. There are a lot of eggs in that one basket, between Mantle, all of the Frostbite engine games, etc, it really seems like a lot of pressure must be mounting for a bunch of coders that already seemed to be put out that they had to release when they did in the first place.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

I haven't crashed in weeks. Why not let me use Mantle on my 290? Those who still have issues will still be in the exact same place they are anyway.

I think we can all be just about done with this part of the Mantle saga anyway. The initial drivers are the 14.1 Betas, and AMD has a history of launching the previous month's betas at the very beginning of the next month....first week of February is my guess.

They don't want mantle to be guilty by association. The amount of crashes is down but the people I play with are still experiencing them on a daily basis.

They want to leave no doubt when mantle launches. Any crashing at all is not going to be acceptable on their initial showcase.

 

[JBT]

I've only had issues once, and that was the game not launching. Deleted a few files in my profile, and it fired right up. That seemed to be more origin related than BF4 though.

 

[OCGuy]

I didn't realize this but Thief is also integrated with the latest version of PhysX. Proprietary battleground!

As far as Mantle, I can't conclude anything from the recommended specs released by Edios. (GTX 660, R9)

 

[ASM-coder]

I'd be way more cautious about making sure that I had a product that could release in a reasonable amount of time with a limited amount of bugs.

One of the things that developers said about Mantle was that it was much easier to debug. DirectX is like a black box. You pass it parameters, and ask to do something and when something goes wrong, you don't know where it failed or why it failed. They found Mantle to be much more *revealing when there was a problem.

*best word I could think of at the time.