Plus there was this DICE Hawaii event Mantle slide that said: "Built by AMD with close collaboration with us at DICE/EA."
Repi actually said that they (AMD) wouldn't have needed to pay anything for Mantle as they (the devs) asked for it.
Also, judging by the low ~2 man month development time, we'd be talking thousands, not millions. Barely even 10's of thousand dollars in developer resources I'd bet.
Holy Rainbow Brite, Batman!
Anyway, as much as I hate EA, I'm glad that some companies are making more multi-core friendly engines and pushing Mantle. Even if Mantle fails and gets co-opted, its ripple effects will probably be good for the industry as a whole.
I'm under the impression that he was paid 8 million dollars by AMD and then got on board. What order that happened in, nobody knows, but the 8 million? Yeah i'd be on board too! Whatever you say AMD! Mantle, done!
On a serious note, if this helps BF4 i'll be the first to say well done. I just really want to see real results instead of power points. It is about time AMD attempted to create value adds like nvidia has done for years to their products..
Read definition 4: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/co-opted
20% is nothing to sneeze at, but Microsoft won't take this lying down. Direct3D and OpenGL if improved enough may narrow the gap enough that Mantle becomes irrelevant. If Mantle is say, 5% faster, it won't even matter. Even 10% is shaky. That's like going from 30 fps to 33 fps. 15% maaaybe. Once we're in that 20+% zone things get more interesting but it's not necessarily a game changer even at 20%.
x86 is irrelevant to this discussion, NV can come up with an answer to Mantle, though the problems is that they aren't in any consoles.. but they are banking on mobile and cloud gaming anyway and it is theoretically possible that being in mobile matters more than being in consoles, in the long run (AMD has no mobile presence). I do think NV made a huge error in not being in next-gen consoles, though. That may come to haunt them in more ways than just Mantle.
Intel will have a greater mobile presence as well even if they aren't in consoles. But I am not sure Intel would actively oppose Mantle in the first place, since anything that boosts PC gaming relative to consoles can only help them, seeing as how Intel is not in consoles.
psoomah, can we get... a secular version of your analysis
thanks
The usual. You know... religion free
BTW... Intel's guy says "2-10k thing is slightly unrealistic", and instead 40-80k calls is perfectly doable @DX current NV/Intel hw.
http://beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1808092&postcount=686
And then a neutral dev saysThere is nothing unrealistic in the figures mentioned.
Today we're seeing the vast majority DX11 games becoming CPU-limited around 3-10K/frame @ ~60fps. Even 10K is quite rare to see at this performance to be honest. Your mileage will vary depending on how powerful your CPU is but obviously there is a wide range of CPUs out there with varying degrees of performance. I would certainly not consider your personal experiment to be reflective of how effective games are at pushing draw calls in real world scenarios.
According to my knowledge, the 10k draw call number (for exceptional developers) in Mantle slides is an accurate estimate for a PC game. You might reach 30k draw calls with PC DirectX when you are doing only simple things (you have a very simple material/animation model in a prototype), but real engines usually use more than one constant buffer for an object, shader count can be quite large (usually leading to many other GPU state changes as well)
And the response from the AMD guy was
http://beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1808118&postcount=688
And then a neutral dev says
http://beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1808180&postcount=691
Andrew Lauritzen said:It does and it's certainly faster than DX, but the 2-10k thing is slightly unrealistic as well. I re-ran some tests and on NVIDIA w/ just the immediate context you can get ~40-80k depending on which state changes you do (including updating some dynamic constants for each w/ discard). Obviously that requires a thread that does nothing other than submit to DX in addition to the thread the driver spawns, but I imagine the 100k figure is using at least two threads as well.
2 months manhours was pure rubbish as some previously claimed. For DICE that means 100s of people working for 2 months. No wonder DICE wanted a fat check.Andersson said DICE spent about two months porting Battlefield 4's Frostbite 3 game engine to Mantle. Asked for a ballpark cost figure, Katsman told me that, for a simple PC project like Nixxes' Thief port, adding Mantle support might amount to roughly a 10% increase in development cost. He was quick to add, however, that such an increase is a drop in the bucket compared to the total development cost of the entire game for all platforms, which might add up to something like $50 million.
http://techreport.com/review/25683/delving-deeper-into-amd-mantle-api/3
2 months manhours was pure rubbish as some previously claimed. For DICE that means 100s of people working for 2 months. No wonder DICE wanted a fat check.
For Thief alone we talk 10% higher cost to add Mantle support. In other words, 1-2 million $ if not more.
2 months manhours was pure rubbish as some previously claimed. For DICE that means 100s of people working for 2 months. No wonder DICE wanted a fat check.
For Thief alone we talk 10% higher cost to add Mantle support. In other words, 1-2 million $ if not more.
The important part you missed, it that he talks about the "PC port" costs of Thief and not the overall game costs.
:awe:
But now its out, 10% cost to cater for a 10% niche that still support DX/OpenGL. No wonder AMD has to pay.
No wonder AMD has to pay.
10% for Thief that is running on Unreal Engine 3, price might be different for other game engines.
Do you have any source for AMD actually paying game developers outside of the cost of having to pay AMD employees to help add Mantle support to their games?
There is only the BF 4 rumor, but that might actually be the price for the bundle deal.
And why haven't we heard anything else? There are now 5 different game studios supporting Mantle, and we have no new rumors about Mantle price.
Thief is an AMD Evolved Game.
Thief is an AMD Evolved Game.
Thief is an AMD Evolved Game.
Star Citizen isn't. Care to explain that?
You dont know yet. Its still a game not even in alpha stage.
So Star Citizen is going to be part of the "They way it's meant to be played" and "AMD Gaming Evolved" programs?
Did that ever happen before?
2 months manhours was pure rubbish as some previously claimed. For DICE that means 100s of people working for 2 months. No wonder DICE wanted a fat check.