The AMD Mantle Thread

[smackababy]

Wait for it... Someone will come out and say: It's not free! It costs the developer time to code this, and that cost is passed on to you. Of course they don't consider Dice/EA may think that this will make the game more accessible to lower powered(CPU wise) rigs, thus selling more copies of BF4, thus no need to raise the price of the game.

But I agree with you. It's free and much cheaper than some of the other options people choose to gain those coveted extra few FPS.

The cost is passed on to you with a lesser product.

I understand you have no concept of how business works, but please don't try to lump those of us with some common sense as some heretic naysayers.

 

[Erenhardt]

YEY!
Server chips for servers!

Now to see what can be done with GPU bottleneck.

 

[DiogoDX]

Arghhh!
According to Tom's Hardware:
"We can reportedly expect an update on AMD's progress this afternoon (EST). AMD is also going to first give the press 24 hours to evaluate the drivers before going through with a public release. Because of this, AMD will likely have to label it Catalyst 14.2 Beta, rather than 14.1 Beta, as the calendars will have flipped over to February by then."

So send the driver first to sites so they can test in singleplayer and with only overclocked i7 processors to show pitful gains. And end users that play multiplayer and uses cheaper processors like i5 or FX that have chance to see decent improvments have to wait another day.

 

[96Firebird]

So send the driver first to sites so they can test in singleplayer and with only overclocked i7 processors to show pitful gains. And end users that play multiplayer and uses cheaper processors like i5 or FX that have chance to see decent improvments have to wait another day.

Review sites know what Mantle is for and how to review it. Please use some logic here...

 

[OCGuy]

People expressed valid concerns about market fragmentation. AMD is giving anyone with an nvidia card...nothing. But hey, who am I to stop your rant?

I think the concerns expressed by some have to do with the style of discussion that you quoted, not that those with Nvidia cards aren't benefiting from AMD's investment.

"You can easily expect between 5-50% performance increase" may be technically correct (although less than 5 has been quoted), it is a comical range that is disingenuous at best, leaning heavily on misleading.

I don't share concerns about market fragmentation. We aren't going to see the API that 2/3rds of the market uses disappear.

And end users that play multiplayer and uses cheaper processors like i5 or FX that have chance to see decent improvments have to wait another day.

I've seen i5 CPUs be referred to as "mid tier" and now "cheap." They are nothing short of an i7, without the HT option, which does not show to improve gaming performance.

Mainstream CPUs are i3s, Celerons...and whatever else comes in a Dell pre-fab as standard. Or a CPU that is relatively mid-range due to age.

 

[DiogoDX]

Review sites know what Mantle is for and how to review it. Please use some logic here...

BF4 was launch in october and yet almost none "press sites" test the game in multiplayer. I don't think they're comming with a new test metodology in 24 hours.

 

[smackababy]

BF4 was launch in october and yet almost none "press sites" test the game in multiplayer. I don't think they're comming with a new test metodology in 24 hours.

At the very least, they will test Mantle under all the same circumstances and release those numbers. Unlike certain other entities. Releasing the best case scenarios is a bit misleading. None of the stuff I've seen even uses the same area to test, but I'd expect as much from marketing.

 

[ASM-coder]

Random Musing:

Based on Johan's comments, I think we can agree that:
"64 players on the large Battlefield levels is really demanding of the CPU"

So, independent of the visual aspects of the game, won't there be an improvement for the Mantle player when his CPU is now free to do more
multiplayer work. (assuming he has an under-powered CPU)

And I wonder what all that work is? Handling all the net traffic, and updating constant state changes?

 

[blackened23]

I don't share concerns about market fragmentation. We aren't going to see the API that 2/3rds of the market uses disappear.

Yeah. I've mentioned this before, but it was the same situation with glide - even with glide in existence, D3D was the go to and only became more popular with time. Glide was more of a "value add" for 3dfx, and it was created initially because D3D was in it's infancy early on and wasn't usable. Hence there were tons of vendor specific APIs, because there was no D3D. Once D3D caught on, it only became more popular over time as compared to vendor APIs (such as the powerVR, rendition verite, 3dfx glide, S3's API, etc). Speaking of which, from what I remember Glide never provided outrageous performance increases. It *did* provide a performance increase, but it also enabled 3dfx specific rendering techniques which weren't available in D3D at the time - so the main benefit was better graphics. That was then and this is now: D3D has caught up in terms of features, although some would argue that should happen at a faster pace. Nonetheless the point remains. I'm not aware of Mantle offering any graphical features that D3D 11 doesn't.

Anyway, back to the point, fragmentation: there are two games we know of using Mantle in 2014 - thief and BF4. There are rumors of all frostbite games using Mantle, but it turns out that isn't true: NFS rivals won't be using Mantle (their devs posted this, the game also has a 30 fps hard coded limit) and DA: Inquisition is unconfirmed. PvZ zombie warfare is also unconfirmed. Star Citizen won't have all modules complete until 2015 and won't be a complete game until then. Oxide's game? There's no determined release date as of yet, unless that very recently changed. Someone correct me if i'm wrong there, but I had not seen a confirmed release date for it. The next Star Wars Battlefront game is slated for 2015.

I guess the point here is, there are 2 known Mantle games for 2014 and 2 possible games, in that the devs have not absolutely confirmed Mantle use. NFS Rivals will not get Mantle. With this being the case, market fragmentation won't be an issue - it's not like Mantle is being used in 100% of games. Far from it. We're talking less than 1% of games right now at this point. Which is fine, since it's a free value add for AMD users.

So with Mantle having limited use: this is where the benefits of Mantle become really strange. We know now that more or less, GPU limited situations show 0-5% improvement with Mantle in BF4 (per SKYMTL). Low end gets 10-15% improvement. I mean it's free improvement. But this isn't what people expected I don't believe, especially after seeing the 45% marketing slides from AMD.

You know, I hate to say it, but this is why you have to be fully skeptical. AMD has made so many promises that were missed over the years, and it really is hard to take what they say at face value after the entire bulldozer thing and all of the inflated claims from their marketing powerpoints. I really do truly hope that AMD takes a new approach in the future of instead of promising stuff that they can't deliver on, to just work quietly and release something awesome when it's done. When it's done, by all means, do your marketing thing at that point. But the pre-hype marketing and failing to deliver IMO doesn't really do their customers justice. Promises for HD3D, freesync, frame pacing (now broken for more than 2 years..) I could go on. The pre-hype pre-promise methodology needs to change IMO. And now we find out that AMD in fact will not hit their January promise for Mantle - honestly, while I expect early Feb, I am not surprised that they missed it. I had 7970CF in the past, so I have been there done that. Gets old after a while.

 

[ASM-coder]

The cost is passed on to you with a lesser product.

Anything to back this up in the case of BF4?

I understand you have no concept of how business works

Funny guy.

 

[GaiaHunter]

The cost is passed on to you with a lesser product.

I understand you have no concept of how business works, but please don't try to lump those of us with some common sense as some heretic naysayers.

Reading around this thread one would believe AMD is paying the developers to implement Mantle, so the cost is passed to AMD.

 

[ASM-coder]

PvZ zombie warfare is also unconfirmed.

PvZ zombie warfare will have Mantle.

 

[blackened23]

PvZ zombie warfare will have Mantle.

AMD said the same about NFS Rivals, and NFS Rivals is in fact not getting Mantle. Did the developers confirm PvZ zombie warfare to have Mantle? Or are you going by an AMD marketing slide which was clearly incorrect regarding NFS rivals?

I should add, hilariously enough, that NFS rivals has a hard coded 30 fps limit which is tied to the physics engine. Increasing the framerate in that game breaks the game. I'm sure you can see the ramifications of Mantle being used in that game to increase the framerate , which breaks the game physics engine.

 

[OCGuy]

PvZ zombie warfare will have Mantle.

When would a CPU bottleneck occur in such a game? AMD is telling us Mantle is for CPU bottlenecks.....so I think we should start looking at this stuff practically.

 

[smackababy]

Reading around this thread one would believe AMD is paying the developers to implement Mantle, so the cost is passed to AMD.

AMD is paying now, but can they afford to continue to pay every developer to implement Mantle? If AMD can, and does, then I would agree Mantle is free. If they don't, developers are going to have to provide additional resources or reallocate resources to implement Mantle. And, unless you live in some fairy tale world, publishers aren't just going to be giving developers more money.

 

[ASM-coder]

Did the developers confirm PvZ zombie warfare to have Mantle? Or are you going by an AMD marketing slide which was clearly incorrect regarding NFS rivals?

I watched Johan talk about it in a presentation.
And there is this Frostbite slide:

And this slide:

This is from Dice, not AMD. Whether right or wrong, this is not bad AMD marketing.

 

[blackened23]

This is from Dice, not AMD. Whether right or wrong, this is not bad AMD marketing.

Nope. Wrong. Those are, in fact, AMD marketing slides. Might wanna check up on that buddy. Johan and AMD did a co-presentation as a marketing event for AMD at GPU14.. Johan was promoting his new engine, while AMD was promoting a new GPU.

That is in fact, not from DICE, and is from AMD, so yeah...it is bad AMD marketing. Like I said. It was AMD's event and they did a co-presentation with Johan to promote Frostbite 3. And again..i'll point out...NFS Rivals isn't getting Mantle.

AMD posted a list of all frostbite 3 games. Problem? None of them aside from BF4 has had mantle confirmed by their respective developers. PvZ' Zombie Warfare isn't going to be a super demanding game, so that brings things into question....aside from that fact, the product page for the game does not list Mantle whatsoever. So it isn't confirmed.

 

[caswow]

AMD is paying now, but can they afford to continue to pay every developer to implement Mantle? If AMD can, and does, then I would agree Mantle is free. If they don't, developers are going to have to provide additional resources or reallocate resources to implement Mantle. And, unless you live in some fairy tale world, publishers aren't just going to be giving developers more money.

how do you know they are paying

 

[ASM-coder]

If they don't, developers are going to have to provide additional resources or reallocate resources to implement Mantle. And, unless you live in some fairy tale world, publishers aren't just going to be giving developers more money.

They will hire more developers if they think they can sell more product.
No need to reduce the quality of the product or raise the price if they can increase volume. Business 101.

 

[smackababy]

So, it is confirmed NFS is going to be patched with Mantle so it can continue to run at a locked 30FPS? Man! Mantle sure is amazing!

 

[GaiaHunter]

AMD is paying now, but can they afford to continue to pay every developer to implement Mantle? If AMD can, and does, then I would agree Mantle is free. If they don't, developers are going to have to provide additional resources or reallocate resources to implement Mantle. And, unless you live in some fairy tale world, publishers aren't just going to be giving developers more money.

If developers relocate additional resources to mantle then it is because it makes economic sense for them to do so.

Which logically means that doesn't make economic sense to spend more resources on DX at the the cost of Mantle.

If it doesn't make economic sense to relocate resources from DX to mantle, then developers won't do so.

We basically have a no problem.

 

[ASM-coder]

That is in fact, not from DICE, and is from AMD, so yeah...it is bad AMD marketing.

The slide is from:
Keynote presentation about Mantle by Johan Andersson at AMD Developer Summit 2013 (APU13)

It says Frostbite on the slide. Those are all EA companies, and they are going to use the Frostbite engine.

 

[smackababy]

If developers relocate additional resources to mantle then it is because it makes economic sense for them to do so.

If developers relocate resources from the DX version to the Mantle version, the DX version suffers under almost all circumstances, otherwise, they'd have just let those resources go. They already don't allocate OpenGL resources in 99% of game development because the additional market isn't large enough to support the investment costs. What makes Mantle any different? The entire market encompassed by Mantle is included in the DX market.

If, at some point in the future, AMD has Mantle support on a vast majority of their marketshare, it might become a strategy to develop against Mantle and DX. And even then, that is a dubious claim.

I understand developers wanting it. I get it. I am a developer. I love new technologies. I wish I could use all kinds of new stuff. However, it makes little financial sense from a business aspect.

 

[Abwx]

Nope. Wrong. Those are, in fact, AMD marketing slides. Might wanna check up on that buddy.

That is in fact, not from DICE, and is from AMD, so yeah...it is bad AMD marketing.

Heck , what an edit, from two sentences to two full paragraphs,
anyway why would AMD marketing be bad ? Because you obviously
dont like AMD..??.

Tell us what is bad in a slide that just point an engine supporting
mantle....

 

[Skurge]

Nope. Wrong. Those are, in fact, AMD marketing slides. Might wanna check up on that buddy. Johan and AMD did a co-presentation as a marketing event for AMD at GPU14.. Johan was promoting his new engine, while AMD was promoting a new GPU.

That is in fact, not from DICE, and is from AMD, so yeah...it is bad AMD marketing. Like I said. It was AMD's event and they did a co-presentation with Johan to promote Frostbite 3. And again..i'll point out...NFS Rivals isn't getting Mantle.

AMD posted a list of all frostbite 3 games. Problem? None of them aside from BF4 has had mantle confirmed by their respective developers. PvZ' Zombie Warfare isn't going to be a super demanding game, so that brings things into question....aside from that fact, the product page for the game does not list Mantle whatsoever. So it isn't confirmed.

I'd like to see where AMD said NFS rivals will have Mantle. You are once again making stuff up.