Why people think that i care about this? I dont need to support companies like Dice. Problem solved.
The question is: What will all these people do now which were on the front of complaining about nVidia's way of life? :hmm:
Its annoying to have a feature that the other party can't/wont have doesn't it?
looks like not watching this was a good choice,
apparently they gave nothing about their new GPUs and the only interesting thing was "Mantle", looking at the slides, it looks to make sense for AMD, trying to get some console style optimizations, or thinking about APUs or whatever, but I can't say I feel positive about a new API which only works with GCN cards, developing something that cannot work with the majority of the GPUs (NV + older AMD GPUs)...
looks like not watching this was a good choice,
apparently they gave nothing about their new GPUs and the only interesting thing was "Mantle", looking at the slides, it looks to make sense for AMD, trying to get some console style optimizations, or thinking about APUs or whatever, but I can't say I feel positive about a new API which only works with GCN cards, developing something that cannot work with the majority of the GPUs (NV + older AMD GPUs)...
looks like not watching this was a good choice,
apparently they gave nothing about their new GPUs and the only interesting thing was "Mantle", looking at the slides, it looks to make sense for AMD, trying to get some console style optimizations, or thinking about APUs or whatever, but I can't say I feel positive about a new API which only works with GCN cards, developing something that cannot work with the majority of the GPUs (NV + older AMD GPUs)...
Maybe amds angle is to offload everything to the gpu so their inferior cpus don't look so bad?
The main problem I'm seeing here is they literally only said it lowers CPU overhead.
Which tells me it's worthless for people with a setup like I do, and that the magic peddlers that say console GPUs are made of unicorns and rainbows were lying all along, as most here suspected.
Mantle is AMD's answer for the fact that their CPUs are utter trash.
It is what they are pinning their hopes on to make their CPUs and APUs worth buying now and for the future (in gaming).
Mantle is NOT vender independent.
Mantle is NOT AMD specific.
Mantle is GCN specific.
Please stop the pie in the sky speculations with no knowledge, thanks.
It will be specific for AMD's cards, but not for the same reason that something like PhysX is limited to having all NV Cards (unless you used the driver trick that resulted from a mistake on NV's part). NV locked down PhysX by choice as a business decision (and an acceptable one).Mantle is not open. There is a reason why we have high level apis on windows and other plattforms. It's a vendor specific api like Cuda.
As Communism so succintly put it: Mantle, being close to metal, is inherently hardware (arch) specific - therefore GCN. Not locked by vendor through tricks. Not an artificial barrier. Not locked through a business decision. It is simply the nature of the beast whenever "close to the metal" access is your objective, whether you are talking of DSP's, GPU, CPU, etc.Mantle is NOT vender independent.
Mantle is NOT AMD specific.
Mantle is GCN specific.
GCN cards have been sold for 2 years now (Well, almost anyway). Soon all APU's will have them as well.
New console games will be codes using (from the sounds of it) a nearly identical API. Which means porting a game from XBO/PS4 to Windows/Linux is going to be cheap and easy. And it means the APU's that currently struggle, will suddenly be ok.
It will be specific for AMD's cards, but not for the same reason that something like PhysX is limited to having all NV Cards (unless you used the driver trick that resulted from a mistake on NV's part). NV locked down PhysX by choice as a business decision (and an acceptable one).
Mantle, being close to the metal, will be specific to the hardware it is targeting. In this regard, it's closer to why assemblers aren't interchangeable for different architectures - they target specific functions provided by the hardware (arch/ISA), so they are in effect locked in by the hardware inherently. There is no going around the fact that if you want to code as close to the metal as possible, there is no way you can make it cross-ISA/cross-hardware, unless the hardware from different archs follow a set of standards in order to make such a thing possible (but then again, if that were the case, they probably wouldn't be completely different archs). Unlike PhysX that's been proven to work even if you don't have an NV card as your main card, because the limitation was artificial (but, in my opinion, not an unexpected business move from NV to make their own products more desirable).
Not that I disapprove of NV's locking down of PhysX. I think it's their call to make, and it's a fine call either way (lock it down or not). I don't have much of an opinion over it, and honestly if it were my product, and I want to sell more GPU's, I might have ended up with the same decision.
I'm only sending this clarification because it's important to be aware of the subtleties in why something like Mantle will always be vendor specific - because any initiative like Mantle (i.e., providing close to the metal access to hardware) will always end up specific to that hardware, so locked to whoever provides that hardware.
And providing the option for Mantle is a good thing. No one is stopping devs from using traditional DX or OpenGL, and they all certainly will continue to use it (no PC dev will abandon DX/OpenGL to go solely on Mantle, that's crazy talk). But seeing as to how AMD has the same hardware in consoles, and that hardware already has close to metal access for devs, it makes sense to also provide that level of access to PC game devs, since the desktop cards from AMD will share the same arch. Win win.
If this mantle business pans out amd just threw a haymaker. 10 years of programming for their GPUs coupled with this new api could instantly end nvidia as a gaming company. The implications are crazy to even think about. Titan gaming performance out of a 7850 anyone?
All that's left now is to wait and see where this punch lands.
If this mantle business pans out amd just threw a haymaker. 10 years of programming for their GPUs coupled with this new api could instantly end nvidia as a gaming company. The implications are crazy to even think about. Titan gaming performance out of a 7850 anyone?
All that's left now is to wait and see where this punch lands.
If this mantle business pans out amd just threw a haymaker. 10 years of programming for their GPUs coupled with this new api could instantly end nvidia as a gaming company. The implications are crazy to even think about. Titan gaming performance out of a 7850 anyone?
All that's left now is to wait and see where this punch lands.
So let me get this straight...AMD just announced a proprietary low level graphics API, and a proprietary 3D audio chip (and assumedly API).
It's like we just time warped back to the late 90s, and the days of 3Dfx glide and Aureal A3D.
As much as I want better graphics performance and 3D audio to make a comeback, I'm totally not ok with this.
It will be specific for AMD's cards, but not for the same reason that something like PhysX is limited to having all NV Cards (unless you used the driver trick that resulted from a mistake on NV's part). NV locked down PhysX by choice as a business decision (and an acceptable one).
Kind of jumping the gun here, eh? Seems like AMD is going to take their ball and go play on a different court with a different set of rules.....too early to conclude if that is negative or positive.
A low level API is always a artificial lock down. It's optimize for a specific hardware. There is no difference to Cuda which only runs on nVidia hardware and a few other processors.
There is a reason why Glide died and why we have higher level Apis. A low level graphics api is bringing us right back to the 90s.
There is an elephant in the room here. What if Mantle, being much more efficient/close to metal approach, can also leverage the hardware more efficiently in an Nvidia GPU? After all, the hardware between Nvidia and AMD is not radically different. Not to say Nvidia will benefit as much as AMD because of architectural commonality, but at the same time maybe Nvidia will not be left as hopelessly behind in Mantle developed games as one might initially think.If this mantle business pans out amd just threw a haymaker. 10 years of programming for their GPUs coupled with this new api could instantly end nvidia as a gaming company. The implications are crazy to even think about. Titan gaming performance out of a 7850 anyone?
All that's left now is to wait and see where this punch lands.
And providing the option for Mantle is a good thing. No one is stopping devs from using traditional DX or OpenGL, and they all certainly will continue to use it (no PC dev will abandon DX/OpenGL to go solely on Mantle, that's crazy talk). But seeing as to how AMD has the same hardware in consoles, and that hardware already has close to metal access for devs, it makes sense to also provide that level of access to PC game devs, since the desktop cards from AMD will share the same arch. Win-win scenario.
From a game dev perspective, I don't think they want to outright ignore all the Nvidia hardware out there, they want to sell games as many as possible.