• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

Ubisoft: AMD's Mantle API is a double-edged sword

Page 4 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
What's worse is that Nvidia won't just let this kind of performance benefit slide, if AMD manage to convince developers significant use of Mantle then Nvidia may just come out with their own custom low level API and then developers have yet ANOTHER API to cater for.

The whole point of DirectX was to stop this rubbish from happening, the slowness of DirectX is not because the API was done badly, it's simply a natural repercussion of making a broadly compatible API for multiple vendors.

Here's looking forward to Nvidias announcement of "Vault" their own low level API, and the upcoming MESS this kind of battle will create for absolutely everyone.
 
PrincessFrosty said:
What's worse is that Nvidia won't just let this kind of performance benefit slide, if AMD manage to convince developers significant use of Mantle then Nvidia may just come out with their own custom low level API and then developers have yet ANOTHER API to cater for.

The whole point of DirectX was to stop this rubbish from happening, the slowness of DirectX is not because the API was done badly, it's simply a natural repercussion of making a broadly compatible API for multiple vendors.

Here's looking forward to Nvidias announcement of "Vault" their own low level API, and the upcoming MESS this kind of battle will create for absolutely everyone.
Click to expand...

The market was very different then.

There were dozens of video card architectures, the video card architectures were very different, almost no one licensed game engines.

These days there is 3 video card architectures, the video card architectures all evolved into highly programmable stream processor, a few engines cover a huge portion of the market.

Additionally, MS keep forcing people for no reason to buy their new OS just to be able to use the new DX.
 
PrincessFrosty said:
What's worse is that Nvidia won't just let this kind of performance benefit slide, if AMD manage to convince developers significant use of Mantle then Nvidia may just come out with their own custom low level API and then developers have yet ANOTHER API to cater for.

The whole point of DirectX was to stop this rubbish from happening, the slowness of DirectX is not because the API was done badly, it's simply a natural repercussion of making a broadly compatible API for multiple vendors.

Here's looking forward to Nvidias announcement of "Vault" their own low level API, and the upcoming MESS this kind of battle will create for absolutely everyone.
Click to expand...


Doubtful - only reason mantle can be alive is the simple fact; first time in history....one apu/gpu rules the consoles.

that's coded on the consoles can be ported much easier with mantle.....that's why it just needs to put into the engines and not per game.

Nvidia has no way to leverage.....this is only possibly because of console wins.....while I was wrong about being the api for all 3.....its the api on PC that will make porting console games faster and easier at least for AMD hardware...

we don't know the numbers yet...we'll have more information soon enough
 
Some quite deep optimisations already exist for both companies in some games. It may not even be that much more difficult to optimise for Mantle than it would be for Dirt Showdown, Tomb Raider etc.

Certainly AMD has a simple aim now - they can forget everything else and just concentrate on getting the devs to optimise with Mantle. I suppose Nvidia could remain semi-relevant by doing more innovative optimisations in certain games, but that's going to take a lot of money and time.
 
SiliconWars said:
Some quite deep optimisations already exist for both companies in some games. It may not even be that much more difficult to optimise for Mantle than it would be for Dirt Showdown, Tomb Raider etc.

Certainly AMD has a simple aim now - they can forget everything else and just concentrate on getting the devs to optimise with Mantle. I suppose Nvidia could remain semi-relevant by doing more innovative optimisations in certain games, but that's going to take a lot of money and time.
Click to expand...


Its not really even that......AMD needs to just get Mantle into the engines that drive most of the games with the ops there. Then porting gets even easier for Game Developers.....

That's what I'm guessing is what AMD will be doing....remember there are a lot more partners for Mantle that just haven't been announced yet and will be in November...if none of the other major engines are involved with Mantle by the announcement in November then I'll eat my hat....
 
Has nobody seen the performance gains the new DX is giving in Win 8.1?

Mantle was dead before it even took off, due to Xbox One not using it.
 
OCGuy said:
Mantle was dead before it even took off, due to Xbox One not using it.
Click to expand...

D3D_Relationships_575px.png


It seems to me I was spot on Ryan thoughts.

http://www.anandtech.com/comments/7...upport-names-xbox-one-api-direct3d-11x/333663

Ryan Smith - Tuesday said:
Which is why that's a one-way arrow in our API diagram. It's our belief that Mantle is the Xbox One's low level API brought to the PC; but it's not a low level PC API brought to the Xbox One. The symmetric property wouldn't apply here.
Click to expand...

http://www.anandtech.com/comments/7...upport-names-xbox-one-api-direct3d-11x/333656

Ryan Smith - Tuesday said:
Of course that assumes that Mantle is significantly different from D3D11.x's low level programming constructs. We won't have the full details until next month, but we are still expecting the two to be highly similar, if not identical in all the important respects. After all, the goal is to ease portability.

Though whether further developers besides DICE pick it up remains to be seen. AMD does need to be able to attract developers to take the time to support Mantle, even if the work is trivial.

"All alligators are crocodiles, but not all crocodiles are alligators"
Click to expand...
 
Lets just see what Mantle enabled titles actually bring to the table. If these titles do raise the bar then other developers will eventually need to adapt as well to match the production quality of Mantle driven titles. At this point it is all marketing hype but this may change when mantle is launched. It would be interesting to see how well BF4 runs on a single GPU at 4k resolution with Mantel.


Teizo said:
Please link so I can see. I can Google, of course, but sharing your link would be helpful too.
Click to expand...
Source

Battlefield_4_Windows_7_vs_8_v2-pcgh.png
 
Last edited:
AnandThenMan said:
No dev worth their salt is going to leave performance on the table if it really is as significant as Mantle could very well deliver. That's why I believe we are seeing statements such as this, and others saying "we will have to support it". At worst it will light a fire under Microsoft, and force them to stop with the nonsense of artificially limited new versions of DX to their latest OS to try and force adoption.
Click to expand...

Literally 100% of devs leave performance on the table. It is, 100% of the time with no exceptions, always a tradeoff between time to develop and support the feature/enhancement versus spending that time working on something else. No software project is every truly finished. Performance will be left on the table when it is "fast enough" very frequently in order to prioritize new content, features, other improvements. I say 100% of the time, because you could theoretically code anything in only assembly and have literally max performance. But that would take an ungodly amount of time.So you leave that performance on the table.

The real question is: does Mantle give me enough bang for the buck (easy to implement, decent performance bump or moderately difficult to implement with huge performance gains) that I will spend the time and money to implement it? That remains to be seen. Clearly, when AMD pays DICE to use it the money spent comes out of someone else's pocket and thus its an obvious choice
 
GaiaHunter said:
Isn't that just a question of the BF4 beta being in a more advanced stage of optimization for Windows 8?
Click to expand...

We will have to see more benchmarks of various titles. Those are only for DX 11.1 and there currently are no titles that are currently available with 11.2 compatibility. Rome 2 may provide better insight.
 
Last edited:
OCGuy said:
Has nobody seen the performance gains the new DX is giving in Win 8.1?

Mantle was dead before it even took off, due to Xbox One not using it.
Click to expand...

Haven't you seen this since you keep beating a dead horse with your clear misunderstanding of mantle?

“What Mantle creates for the PC is a development environment that’s *similar* to the consoles, which already offer low-level APIs, close-to-metal programming, easier development and more (vs. the complicated PC environment). By creating a more console-like developer environment, Mantle: improves time to market; reduces development costs; and allows for considerably more efficient rendering, improving performance for gamers. The console connection is made because next-gen uses Radeon, so much of the programming they’re doing for the consoles are already well-suited to a modern Radeon architecture on the desktop; that continuum is what allows Mantle to exist.”
Click to expand...
http://www.guru3d.com/news_story/am..._exclusive_to_pc_not_present_on_xbox_one.html

Whether it lives or dies, time will tell, but it's not been claimed to work as you keep implying you misunderstood.
 
GaiaHunter said:
The market was very different then.

There were dozens of video card architectures, the video card architectures were very different, almost no one licensed game engines.

These days there is 3 video card architectures, the video card architectures all evolved into highly programmable stream processor, a few engines cover a huge portion of the market.

Additionally, MS keep forcing people for no reason to buy their new OS just to be able to use the new DX.
Click to expand...

It's not so much the number of concurrent architectures that's the problem, although that IS itself a problem, a bigger problem is ongoing compatibility, are we to believe AMD are forever locked into the GCN architecture? I highly doubt that, when it comes time for them to switch the underlying architecture, what's going to happen to mantle?

This is a question I've posed right from the start, it actually doesn't have anything to do with Nvidia responding, they're 2 distinct problems but share in common the fact that APIs ALWAYS trade off flexibility for optimisation, it's inherent to the problem of an evolving GPU architecture.

I'd say you're over exaggerating MS's actions, they've broken backwards compatibility once so far, that's the XP/Vista DX9/10 divide, and there was good reason for that, DirectX was re-factored to make use of a much better driver model. I know there's planned further changes, we've yet to see if this is truly necessary or not.

It's not as though something like mantle isn't also going to be vulnerable to this in the long run, it will.

MeldarthX said:
Doubtful - only reason mantle can be alive is the simple fact; first time in history....one apu/gpu rules the consoles.

that's coded on the consoles can be ported much easier with mantle.....that's why it just needs to put into the engines and not per game.

Nvidia has no way to leverage.....this is only possibly because of console wins.....while I was wrong about being the api for all 3.....its the api on PC that will make porting console games faster and easier at least for AMD hardware...

we don't know the numbers yet...we'll have more information soon enough
Click to expand...

Well the fact that we're seeing confirmation from the console vendors that mantle isn't supported crushes this theory, it's a nice theory one in which I was tentatively on board with when the mantle news broke because obviously it's a real killer move from ATI, but everything we know about it right says it's a PC only API and even if it was to move to consoles there's no reason to believe it would be better than the native APIs and so any more attractive to developers wanting to develop multi-platform, afterall no developer is going to pick mantle only and just abandon all the Nvidia users, that's bonkers.
 
OCGuy said:
Has nobody seen the performance gains the new DX is giving in Win 8.1?
Click to expand...

Are you talking about BF4 beta? Wasn't that just a case of the new game optimizations that have since improved the Win7 performance as well? This is from what I read in the CPU forum thread.
 
PrincessFrosty said:
It's not so much the number of concurrent architectures that's the problem, although that IS itself a problem, a bigger problem is ongoing compatibility, are we to believe AMD are forever locked into the GCN architecture? I highly doubt that, when it comes time for them to switch the underlying architecture, what's going to happen to mantle?

This is a question I've posed right from the start, it actually doesn't have anything to do with Nvidia responding, they're 2 distinct problems but share in common the fact that APIs ALWAYS trade off flexibility for optimisation, it's inherent to the problem of an evolving GPU architecture.

I'd say you're over exaggerating MS's actions, they've broken backwards compatibility once so far, that's the XP/Vista DX9/10 divide, and there was good reason for that, DirectX was re-factored to make use of a much better driver model. I know there's planned further changes, we've yet to see if this is truly necessary or not.

It's not as though something like mantle isn't also going to be vulnerable to this in the long run, it will.
Click to expand...

Several things.

1st) AMD might just wish to leverage for the short term - be competitive without Mantle and be a lot faster (dunno how much a lot faster really is, if faster at all) with Mantle.
Once a new architecture proves to be a better investment, why keep Mantle? If with Mantle GCN is a lot faster than with a new architecture, why change architecture instead of having beefier specs without breaking Mantle compatibility?

2nd) AMD used VLIW for 6 years. NVIDIA CUDA core has been with us since the GTX8800. As I said before GPU architectures have evolved in a different manner in the last few years and actually AMD and NVIDIA architectures share many more things in common now that they did 10 years ago.

3rd) There is a Mantle driver.

4th) MS broke Windows XP->Windows Vista/7 and now is breaking it again with Windows7->Windows 8. Also look at the sorry state of Windows Phone.


Well the fact that we're seeing confirmation from the console vendors that mantle isn't supported crushes this theory, it's a nice theory one in which I was tentatively on board with when the mantle news broke because obviously it's a real killer move from ATI, but everything we know about it right says it's a PC only API and even if it was to move to consoles there's no reason to believe it would be better than the native APIs and so any more attractive to developers wanting to develop multi-platform, afterall no developer is going to pick mantle only and just abandon all the Nvidia users, that's bonkers.
Click to expand...

Why would consoles need mantle?
They already have their own low level APIs.
 
Last edited:
biostud said:
Is there any reason why Microsoft couldn't make a low level API part of future DirectX versions?
Click to expand...

yes, unless you want to go back to windows 98 level stability. something like mantle can work because your target specification is small so abstraction can be low. WDDM abstraction is large because it has a very large set of hardware and software to support.

I love All the DOA DOA spouting by hacks here 🙄

Xbox one was never going to "use" mantle. All you have to do is think about it for 5 seconds..... xbox one, HUMA based system with complex memory hierarchy vs traditional GPU. Your going to have to do a whole lot of stuff on X1 (data management) you just dont care about on a traditional GPU.

The point of mantel is to allow for the same low level access and to allow reuse of things like logic and HLSL. The other thing these agenda wheeling doom bringers try to push is that now DX is all magical..... Hello WDDM still exists and there is still heaps of stuff within GCN that you can't do via DX like accessing the scalar ALU's, using the volatile bits etc. These are the things that the consoles will be using in there shader code and that is what mantel will allow access to for PC.
 
GaiaHunter said:
2nd) AMD used VLIW for 6 years. NVIDIA CUDA core has been with us since the GTX8800. As I said before GPU architectures have evolved in a different manner in the last few years and actually AMD and NVIDIA architectures share many more things in common now that they did 10 years ago.
Click to expand...

VLIW is not equal to CUDA. The AMD equal to CUDA is STREAM/OpenCL, soon HSA.

GaiaHunter said:
3rd) There is a Mantle driver.
Click to expand...

AMD cant even make a proper DX driver. 4 years and still lacking functions.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top