The AMD Mantle Thread

[SiliconWars]

He's including the entire PC market including Intel's IGP's, in which case Nvidia only owns 16.1% of the market. Sontin, Shintai and Cloudfire have been going on about AMD's tiny market share all thread, so I created a new one to discuss it but it was closed.

Details here - http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2345374

Simple fact is, AMD owns more of the gaming market than Nvidia any way you look at it.

 

[Keysplayr]

He's including the entire PC market including Intel's IGP's, in which case Nvidia only owns 16.1% of the market. Sontin, Shintai and Cloudfire have been going on about AMD's tiny market share all thread, so I created a new one to discuss it but it was closed.

Details here - http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2345374

Simple fact is, AMD owns more of the gaming market than Nvidia any way you look at it.

Oh you mean the troll thread that was locked. I see that.
Sontin, I'm sure you don't want SiliconWars answering for you but he's all too happy to do it.
Please provide some sources to back up your claim, else we can't go any further with that argument of yours. Fair is fair.

 

[SiliconWars]

ROFL you expect an answer from Sontin? He still hasn't backed up his "100 million Kepler" point after making it twice.

And it wasn't a troll thread either - it was supposed to get the BS market-share trolling out of the Mantle thread. It would have succeeded in doing that but look where we are again half a day later. No doubt the mods will be telling us to get back on topic soon, oh well.

Infraction issued for moderator callout.
-- stahlhart

 

[sontin]

When you say "whole graphics market" does that mean the entirety of GPU sales whether discrete, mobile, SoC or other? Because that seems like very low numbers, even for AMD. Please quote a source for your information on this please?

The x86 graphics market:
http://jonpeddie.com/press-releases/details/amd-winner-in-q2-intel-up-nvidia-down/

It's 21,9% with APUs which are not using GCN except Temash/Kabini.

 

[SiliconWars]

The x86 graphics market:
http://jonpeddie.com/press-releases/details/amd-winner-in-q2-intel-up-nvidia-down/

It's 21,9% with APUs which are not using GCN except Temash/Kabini.

So you agree that based on your chosen way to present the information, Nvidia has less market graphics market share than AMD, and has been in this position for many years?

 

[sontin]

...

Yes, their graphics share is lower because they dont sell a cheap x86 SoC with their own graphics IP.
But what has that to do with Mantle and GCN only support?
Kepler went up against GCN and nVidia shipped nearly twice the numbers of cards than AMD. And because Mantle only supports GCN we can put pre-GCN, Intel and Intel (PowerVR) into the mix to see how dumb it is to put the same amount of money into another API which only benefits <= 10% of the market.

 

[SiliconWars]

...

Yes, their graphics share is lower because they dont sell a cheap x86 SoC with their own graphics IP.

Nvidia probably sells around the same amount of graphics with less than or similar performance to AMD's APU's. Everything from the GT 640 and down is in the same class, and sells millions of units per quarter. If you aren't counting AMD's APU's in that, you can't count those either.

But what has that to do with Mantle and GCN only support?
Kepler went up against GCN and nVidia shipped nearly twice the numbers of cards than AMD. And because Mantle only supports GCN we can put pre-GCN, Intel and Intel (PowerVR) into the mix to see how dumb it is to put the same amount of money into another API which only benefits <= 10% of the market.

AMD's current APU's will be replaced by Kaveri on a 1-1 basis, meaning all future chips coming out of AMD will be Mantle-ready. And this is why it's so exciting for developers - those borderline APU's that can barely game under DX11 would actually be pretty decent with Mantle, instantly increasing the gaming market. This is exactly what the devs want - cheaper chips.

So Kaveri, Radeon and Consoles, all ready for Mantle and ~2/3rd's of the realistic gaming market next year. That is what Nvidia faces, not AMD's 21% overall market share.

 

[Leadbox]

...

Yes, their graphics share is lower because they dont sell a cheap x86 SoC with their own graphics IP.
But what has that to do with Mantle and GCN only support?
Kepler went up against GCN and nVidia shipped nearly twice the numbers of cards than AMD. And because Mantle only supports GCN we can put pre-GCN, Intel and Intel (PowerVR) into the mix to see how dumb it is to put the same amount of money into another API which only benefits <= 10% of the market.

The market is not static
Who knows, mantle might yet tip you over the edge and your next gpu might just be a redeon.....

 

[sontin]

Nvidia probably sells around the same amount of graphics with less than or similar performance to AMD's APU's. Everything from the GT 640 and down is in the same class, and sells millions of units per quarter. If you aren't counting AMD's APU's in that, you can't count those either.

And nVidia will sell Tegra chips with the same performance like certain AMD x86 APUs in the future. So, i can count them, too? :hmm:

AMD's current APU's will be replaced by Kaveri on a 1-1 basis, meaning all future chips coming out of AMD will be Mantle-ready. And this is why it's so exciting for developers - those borderline APU's that can barely game under DX11 would actually be pretty decent with Mantle, instantly increasing the gaming market. This is exactly what the devs want - cheaper chips.

Logan will replace pre-Kepler-Tegra SoC 1:1. Hm, i guess this makes the same developers happy about OpenGL, too? :hmm:

So Kaveri, Radeon and Consoles, all ready for Mantle and ~2/3rd's of the realistic gaming market next year. That is what Nvidia faces, not AMD's 21% overall market share.

So, now we declare a "realistic gaming market"? What is with iOS and Android?
You have no clue how AMD's next products will sell. Or how they can stand against Intel and the ARM SoCs. But to declare them "the realistic gaming market" today is quite funny.

The market is not static

And it goes in both way.

 

[SiliconWars]

And nVidia will sell Tegra chips with the same performance like certain AMD x86 APUs in the future. So, i can count them, too? :hmm:

If they ever got to the stage where they were worthy of being counted as proper 3d gaming chips, sure.

But let's not get deflected from the issue. In reality, Nvidia's 62% discrete market share is being bloated by low price graphics that compare to AMD's APU's, so if you discount the APU's you have to discount everything below the GT 640. If you did that AMD would probably have more discrete market share as well.

Logan will replace pre-Kepler-Tegra SoC 1:1, too. Hm, i guess this makes the same developers happy about OpenGL, too? :hmm:

So, now we declare a "realistic gaming market"? What is with iOS and Android?

All of them are far from being able to play AAA titles properly, which is the point of Mantle - there is no need for a low level API for stuff like Angry Birds. Mantle is for high end PC gaming.

You have no clue how AMD's next products will sell. Or how they can stand against Intel and the ARM SoCs. But to declare them "the realistic gaming market" today is quite funny.

Sure I have a clue - It'll barely be much different than what it is today. Given the number of high-end motherboards we're seeing for Kaveri it's unlikely to be bad enough to affect AMD's gaming market share negatively.

 

[sontin]

If they ever got to the stage where they were worthy of being counted as proper 3d gaming chips, sure.

Ha? So we now declare "proper 3D gaming chips"? Hm, this makes even the next gen consoles not worthy...

But let's not get deflected from the issue. In reality, Nvidia's 62% discrete market share is being bloated by low price graphics that compare to AMD's APU's, so if you discount the APU's you have to discount everything below the GT 640. If you did that AMD would probably have more discrete market share as well.

...
Really, what? nVidia is shipping these GPUs to their AIBs and they are selling them. And i do not discount anything from AMD. It's their own fault that Mantle is limited to GCN...
Anyway, we can ignore AMD's low end discrete cards, too?!

All of them are far from being able to play AAA titles properly, which is the point of Mantle - there is no need for a low level API for stuff like Angry Birds. Mantle is for high end PC gaming.

So, if Mantle is only for "high end pc gaming" then why should we count AMD's APUs with GCN again? :awe:

Sure I have a clue - It'll barely be much different than what it is today. Given the number of high-end motherboards we're seeing for Kaveri it's unlikely to be bad enough to affect AMD's gaming market share negatively.

Yes, because the number of motherboards says something about the market potential. :|

 

[Creig]

I really doubt that mantle is the API used verbatim in all of those platforms, mantle will probably be as similar to or offer the same features as the low level APIs on the consoles. Even if AMD had a significant part to play in designing the APIs used in the consoles, I find it hard to believe that licensing restrictions would be so lax as to allow AMD to use the exact same API in its own products.

The API probably won't allow verbatim programming between all the platforms, I agree. But I would hope that the GCN core portion will be. If that is the case, then the majority of the programming workload can be ported between the various platforms with only minor tweaking necessary. The platform specific features can be then added afterwards.

I feel that is one of the primary goals of Mantle. Reducing the workload necessary to bring a game to multiple platforms by allowing coding to be shared between them. And by doing so, this opens the door to allow low-level programming to become more prolific due to being interoperable between the XB1/PS4/GCN PC. Writing low-level programming for three or four separate architectures makes little sense to a developer. The manpower necessary would be cost and time prohibitive. But low-level programming for one architecture which can be then be shared on three or four different platforms? I'm sure that sounds a lot more appealing.

Something I haven't really read much about is DX11 and its role with these next gen consoles. From what I understand so far, XB1/PS4/WiiU are all DX11 compatible. So a dev wouldn't even have to use Mantle at all, should he not wish to. DX11 would cover all his bases, console and PC market alike. The only limiting factor would be hardware. If the consoles aren't powerful enough to process the graphics levels the devs wish to display under DX11, then Mantle becomes an obvious option to increase performance without a corresponding increase in workload.

 

[SiliconWars]

Ha? So we now declare "proper 3D gaming chips"? Hm, this makes even the next gen consoles not worthy...

How will BF4 be running on Tegra 4? Or any of the AAA titles? This bizarre crusade you are on to prove that Android is some kind of proper gaming environment is just...

...Really, what? nVidia is shipping these GPUs to their AIBs and they are selling them. And i do not discount anything from AMD. It's their own fault that Mantle is limited to GCN...
Anyway, we can ignore AMD's low end discrete cards, too?!

Sure, based on the last numbers we had Nvidia was selling a lot of <$100 cards.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/graphi...h_End_Mainstream_Graphics_Cards_Research.html

Two thirds of Nvidia's Graphics cards sales were <$100 "APU level" performance. Now that was a few years ago and things have changed, but there's no doubt that Nvidia is still selling millions more sub $100 cards than AMD. Most of that market share loss since then is due to AMD's shift to APU's - if APU's were counted as discrete graphics then AMD would easily have a higher market share than Nvidia.

So, if Mantle is only for "high end pc gaming" then why should we count AMD's APUs with GCN again? :awe:

You realise the point of Mantle is to get more out of the hardware? You realise that AMD's APU's are far more powerful than anything Nvidia has with Tegra? You realise the first Steam Box is running a Trinity mobile APU?

Mantle makes low-end hardware high-end by removing the DX overhead.

Yes, because the number of motherboards says something about the market potential. :|

That's exactly right, or do you think Gigabyte, Asus etc are bringing out high end Kaveri mobo's for the fun of it?

http://semiaccurate.com/2013/08/22/gigabyte-goes-kaveri-crazy-with-seven-new-boards/

Seven boards are not a tentative step, nor is a G1.Sniper gaming rig. Do read things into this.

 

[krumme]

AMD Mantle: interview de Raja Koduri

http://www.hardware.fr/focus/89/amd-mantle-interview-raja-koduri.html

Did anyone notice the absolutely idiotic remarks from the head of PR? He knew absolutely zerro. And Raja had to save him. Lol.

Man it must be a pain in the ass for a capacity like Raja to have such an idiot on his back.

Sometimes this PR is more a step bacwards than forward. In this case it was even funny.

 

[Yarn]

Support means you can use one of the supported API to write your game. But you need to write all these shaders for your assets. Even with Tessellation you need to write shaders for two stages and only the triangle creation process is handled by fixed function units.

You dont need to write shaders, but you can. Anyway what does a graphics engine do and how does it get it done if it doesn't really talk to the graphics API it only "supports" it.

There is only one game with Mantle support in the next 3 months - BF4. Nobody know what will come after it.

Oh so you only know of one game. You dont actually know how many games will use it. Glad we cleared that up.

PC market.

I hope you don't mean DX.

AMD has only 21,9% of the whole graphics market - and this number includes the APUs...
The GCN market share is around 10%.

Yea you totally misunderstood that. The link you posted later confirms this. You're taking about the entire GPU market which ignores the fact that some of the owners of these GPUs are not willing and able to buy AAA games let alone any game at all, some people have multiple GPUs from different manufacturers and they don't buy multiple copies of the same game, among other things. In other words the market for AAA games does not consist of every GPU owned or sold.

PhysX is high level. You dont write for a certain architecture. You compile your code to different processors (x86, Cell, ARM, Cuda...).
A graphics API is different because you write against it with different languages (Cg, HLSL, GLSL...) and the driver is converting it to the underlaying architecture. Mantle needs the developer for this part to optimize for the architecture.

You misunderstand, I agree it is higher level just like the middleware that would sit on top of mantle. Similarly, Physx runs on top of CUDA. Compare CUDA to mantle and not to Physx.

 

[beginner99]

...
In a world with programmable shaders you dont write an engine against an API. Your engine has support for an API but the developer is responsible for the rest.

From below interview I quote.

AMD Mantle: interview de Raja Koduri

http://www.hardware.fr/focus/89/amd-mantle-interview-raja-koduri.html

The other key thing about Mantle is that today a significant amount of the game titles are based on [middleware] engines, the top 4 or 5 engines are covering a huge percentage of the market. If these engines are taking care of the platform differences, hardware differences, Nvidia, AMD, Sony, Microsoft, the actual game developer is covered from that issue.


Exactly what I tried to explain and is here repeated be the responsible AMD employee. If an engine uses Mantle then the game uses it. The game developer doesn't even notice or needs to care about it. Do you get it and believe ti now, sontin?

It's just sad than fanboy are like religious zealots. Blind to reality. And anyone reading CPU forum nows I am not an AMD fanboy.

 

[krumme]

And anyone reading CPU forum nows I am not an AMD fanboy.

I can testament to that. Absolutely not. Lol.

 

[blackened23]

Exactly what I tried to explain and is here repeated be the responsible AMD employee. If an engine uses Mantle then the game uses it. The game developer doesn't even notice or needs to care about it. Do you get it and believe ti now, sontin?

Yeah, I agree with this assessment. AMD is not going to talk to 2000 developers about Mantle because they do not have to do so; all they have to do is make a sales pitch to get Mantle into all next-generation game engines and that will automatically cover 80% of all games released. There are 3 engines in that context, and Mantle will be in one of them after December. Unreal engine obviously the biggest multiplat engine, although Epic has not commented on Mantle. CryEngine 3 is another, and the developers there tweeted that they are open to the idea of their engine using Mantle. And then Frostbite - after December, every Frostbite 3 will have Mantle available for use. That means the next Dragon Age game will likely have Mantle baked in from the get-go.

So this strategy really isn't a tough one for AMD, and from a multi platform perspective it makes sense because GCN powers all of the next-generation consoles. AMD obviously still has work to do in terms of finalizing Mantle and pitching it to Epic and the makers of CryEngine, but that is simply all they have to do. And that shouldn't be too difficult because GCN is powering all of the next-gen consoles, as mentioned - the GCN functions used in Mantle will be similar to those used in the XB1 and PS4 specific APIs. Not a hard sales pitch, IMHO, but we'll see what happens. In any case this is not something that will happen overnight - from the outset there will be few Mantle titles; i'm guessing 3-4 titles in 2014. Depending on how hard AMD works in getting them into multiplatform engines, that could change a year or two from now - if they get it into other engines that power nearly every console and PC game, it isn't hard to see adoption of Mantle on a wide scale. But that is a long term proposition which will take a year or longer.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

I just love this thread. Everyone is commenting on how Mantle can't possibly work because it's blah blah blah...

When asked what their experience with software/game development is. "Well, uh, I bought a GPU once."

 

[gorobei]

I just love this thread. Everyone is commenting on how Mantle can't possibly work because it's blah blah blah...

When asked what their experience with software/game development is. "Well, uh, I bought a GPU once."

its amusing since we have no numbers yet. hopefully the upcoming amd presentation will give us at least a ballpark. i think its on the 11th and supposed to run a few days probably right up to the day the 290x goes on sale.

i suspect part of the furor is just FUD to keep opinions neutral until nv can figure out a response(ie ignore/match with own version/submit a version for mantle). if they do choose to come up with their own version, it will take time and they will have to figure out how to budget for it. if they had no idea that mantle was coming, those decisions will also require some preliminary survey and number crunching to figure out viability hence their relative silence on mantle officially.

 

[smackababy]

its amusing since we have no numbers yet. hopefully the upcoming amd presentation will give us at least a ballpark. i think its on the 11th and supposed to run a few days probably right up to the day the 290x goes on sale.

i suspect part of the furor is just FUD to keep opinions neutral until nv can figure out a response(ie ignore/match with own version/submit a version for mantle). if they do choose to come up with their own version, it will take time and they will have to figure out how to budget for it. if they had no idea that mantle was coming, those decisions will also require some preliminary survey and number crunching to figure out viability hence their relative silence on mantle officially.

Right before Mantle was announced, they released a statement claiming the performance of DX vs that 'to the metal' was almost negligible. Now, at the time, I thought it was a dig at consoles, but a few days later, I saw it was them combating Mantle before it was announced.

I still think the way this is being talking about more and more, the less it will have real impact. If it is just a low level API for accessing the hardware, it will be in the lap of the developer of the game and / or the engine to do the necessary image processing before sending it (something the DX API allows you to do AND then it sends to the hardware).

The performance gains will likely only be high in games developed with AMD offering significant help, a better high level API, or someone like Carmack / Lottes coding it.

DX could be more advance developer friendly and allow you to skip parts of their stack and allow you do it yourself, which would help with some of the DX slowdown.

 

[gorobei]

Right before Mantle was announced, they released a statement claiming the performance of DX vs that 'to the metal' was almost negligible. Now, at the time, I thought it was a dig at consoles, but a few days later, I saw it was them combating Mantle before it was announced.

I still think the way this is being talking about more and more, the less it will have real impact. If it is just a low level API for accessing the hardware, it will be in the lap of the developer of the game and / or the engine to do the necessary image processing before sending it (something the DX API allows you to do AND then it sends to the hardware).

The performance gains will likely only be high in games developed with AMD offering significant help, a better high level API, or someone like Carmack / Lottes coding it.

DX could be more advance developer friendly and allow you to skip parts of their stack and allow you do it yourself, which would help with some of the DX slowdown.

from what i have gathered from carmacks annual speeches, lottes, and johannA's video; the primary things mantle will improve are cpu cycles spent prepping drawcalls and the speed you can get data/textures into vram.

the number of compute cycles wasted just getting enough data to feed the gpu is one of the main overheads they talk about. the other is the amount of time and opacity on getting stuff into vram. the dx penalty means you cant explicitly specify where the texture ends up in ram or the path it takes. carmack has spoken repeatedly about wanting to be able to directly poke it into ram exactly where they want it so the gpu can directly process it.

all the dx steps take cycles and you have less control about where/when/how the data arrives. skipping those cycles is only done through direct to metal calls.

 

[Rvenger]

Right before Mantle was announced, they released a statement claiming the performance of DX vs that 'to the metal' was almost negligible. Now, at the time, I thought it was a dig at consoles, but a few days later, I saw it was them combating Mantle before it was announced.

I still think the way this is being talking about more and more, the less it will have real impact. If it is just a low level API for accessing the hardware, it will be in the lap of the developer of the game and / or the engine to do the necessary image processing before sending it (something the DX API allows you to do AND then it sends to the hardware).

The performance gains will likely only be high in games developed with AMD offering significant help, a better high level API, or someone like Carmack / Lottes coding it.

DX could be more advance developer friendly and allow you to skip parts of their stack and allow you do it yourself, which would help with some of the DX slowdown.

This is how Nvidia has optimized games for their hardware. Basically this is AMD coming up with the times. Its a good thing IMO. On the games that aren't optimized for that specific brand, its not like its unplayable or 50% slower. Nvidia may have 130fps while AMD might only have 115fps etc etc. Then it will flip flop depending on the game. I don't think Mantle will give a 50% increase but I would think 15% is realistic at best. Nvidia certainly has their games that perform along the lines of the same.

 

[wand3r3r]

From below interview I quote.



The other key thing about Mantle is that today a significant amount of the game titles are based on [middleware] engines, the top 4 or 5 engines are covering a huge percentage of the market. If these engines are taking care of the platform differences, hardware differences, Nvidia, AMD, Sony, Microsoft, the actual game developer is covered from that issue.


Exactly what I tried to explain and is here repeated be the responsible AMD employee. If an engine uses Mantle then the game uses it. The game developer doesn't even notice or needs to care about it. Do you get it and believe ti now, sontin?

It's just sad than fanboy are like religious zealots. Blind to reality. And anyone reading CPU forum nows I am not an AMD fanboy.

Good points.

Now we just need the numbers.

 

[Black Octagon]

We need lots of facts, including non-numerical ones...