What Was the Point/Effect of Mantle?

[Stuka87]

I thought Mantle had a limited effect, like 10%-40%. Double would be huge.

It depends greatly on the game, cpu, and GPU.

In my case I had an AMD 965BE @4GHz that was VERY CPU limited playing BF4. My GPu (7950) would sit at around 50% utilization. Mantle freed up a big chunk of CPU, allowing me to push through a lot more data to the GPU. So I went from big 30's to mid 60's for average FPS.

 

[Stuka87]

I'm curious too. We do know though that DX12 requires a new driver model, WDDM 2.0, which must have been in development for quite some time.

This is an artificial requirement. Something MS likes to do to make people upgrade to newer versions of windows, and its less work for themselves by only making it for one OS. They did the same thing with DX11 and DX10.

 

[destrekor]

This is an artificial requirement. Something MS likes to do to make people upgrade to newer versions of windows, and its less work for themselves by only making it for one OS. They did the same thing with DX11 and DX10.

This could be the case, and quite likely it is. However, it may be that it is how Microsoft is providing for the more minimal abstraction with regards to resources. AMD was able to do it without any such requirements because their Mantle/GCN interaction isn't hardware-agnostic, it requires their driver. With that, hardware-specific APIs are possible for sure. APIs that are hardware-agnostic, that perhaps requires some fancier tricks.

We'll know for sure once Vulkan is released and if vendors are able to support that on any version of Windows. I suspect they will be able to do so, but then again, it's no guarantee that D3D 12 for some reason doesn't truly require WDDM 2.0. Why? Because Vulkan support is still very much dependent on the drivers, so coding Vulkan support might just require more work at the driver level than D3D 12.

Again, it's almost surely just a platform requirement to advance adoption rates, I don't think there is much in the past to dispute this as their M.O.. That said, I do think the requirements moving between XP and Vista (D3D 10?) were likely honest, as the kernel stack was almost entirely redone between NT 6.x and NT 5.x.

 

[Silverforce11]

I give up. Make valid points, people ignore them. OK, fine. Enjoy your little bubble.

So the developers who have said how similar DX12 is to Mantle got it all wrong, and you are right?

Why are you so adamant that DX12 isn't built upon Mantle as the foundation? It happened with Vulkan. AMD and MS worked very closely for the Xbox. Doesn't take much of a leap.

What exactly does one gain for denying Mantle -> DX12 and Vulkan?

 

[loccothan]

And now We Have Mantle everywhere :biggrin:, so no more slow APIs for Gamers -> All Console like to-silicon coding.
AMD do the Great Job for us Gamers ()
Richard Huddy FTW -> https://twitter.com/richardhuddy

 

[stahlhart]

And, on that note, I hope that the OP got their question answered, because we're not going to go through this crap again here for the 1,000th time. Next time use the search function.
-- stahlhart