The AMD Mantle Thread

[Cloudfire777]

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.

Lets see here:

AMD make both discrete GPUs and APUs with IGPs.
Nvidia make discrete GPUs.

Because of this, the total market share is bigger for AMD. But Nvidia make big profit, while AMD barely makes profit on GPUs while losing big bucks on APUs/CPUs, which nets them a loss quarter after quarter.
Who is in the better situation here you think?

I could go on war against the shops selling TVs. They sell their TV for $500 and nets them $100 per Tv, but I can sell the same TV for $300 which makes me lose $100 per TV. I promise you I would sell a lot more and have way bigger market share, but in the end I lose although my sales and market share is bigger.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

Lets see here:

AMD make both discrete GPUs and APUs with IGPs.
Nvidia make discrete GPUs.

Because of this, the total market share is bigger for AMD. But Nvidia make big profit, while AMD barely makes profit on GPUs while losing big bucks on APUs/CPUs., which nets them a loss quarter after quarter.

Anything else you'd like to add? But nice little spin you tried to make

I am almost positive that AMD isn't losing money anymore. Did they turn it around recently? I would search for some articles but its a pain on a phone.

 

[SiliconWars]

Lets see here:

AMD make both discrete GPUs and APUs with IGPs.
Nvidia make discrete GPUs.

Because of this, the total market share is bigger for AMD. But Nvidia make big profit, while AMD barely makes profit on GPUs while losing big bucks on APUs/CPUs., which nets them a loss quarter after quarter.

Anything else you'd like to add? But nice little spin you tried to make

You're mostly right but you lack the full details.

Much of Nvidia's profit is down to the Intel licensing agreement made 3 years ago and running out in 3 years time. On top of that they do make some good money out of professional cards. These two sources are what AMD lacks. On the flipside, Nvidia leaks even more cash through Tegra than AMD does from CPU's.

In terms of actual gaming cards they aren't making much at all, and neither is AMD. If you look over the past 5 years both companies are about break-even point in profit for client graphics. The console business will improve the situation for AMD but nothing that will change their finances by a huge amount.

All of this is moot however, as the point being made is about market share not revenue share. The game devs don't give a hoot about who is making money or how much, all they care about is how many people are buying their games. The better and cheaper gaming PC's are, the more money they make.

It's not spin btw, it's simple fact backed by sources.

 

[smackababy]

I am almost positive that AMD isn't losing money anymore. Did they turn it around recently? I would search for some articles but its a pain on a phone.

They've lost in the last 2 quarters and made money in Q4 2012, IIRC. AMD has never been in great shape as a company.

 

[Yarn]

Lets see here:

AMD make both discrete GPUs and APUs with IGPs.
Nvidia make discrete GPUs.

Because of this, the total market share is bigger for AMD. But Nvidia make big profit, while AMD barely makes profit on GPUs while losing big bucks on APUs/CPUs, which nets them a loss quarter after quarter.
Who is in the better situation here you think?

I could go on war against the shops selling TVs. They sell their TV for $500 and nets them $100 per Tv, but I can sell the same TV for $300 which makes me lose $100 per TV. I promise you I would sell a lot more and have way bigger market share, but in the end I lose although my sales and market share is bigger.

How is any of this relevant?

 

[Yarn]

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.

One can only hope that porting between DX, mantle and the console APIs will be as hassle free as possible. I mostly agree with everything in this post though.

 

[blackened23]

nvm

 

[chimaxi83]

Lol, business as usual for our fine Nvidia folk. Financials revenue marketshare. Oh, and PhysX.

Well anyway, I'm looking forward to whatever Mantle will bring but I'm not getting my hopes up. I'll be attempting to pre-order the 290X/BF4 bundle, so I'm really just hoping for something decent. I like my 7970 CF performance, but I'm excited enough about the new card, possibilities of the new API, and no multi-GPU worries to ditch my Lightnings. Then again, if the card is decent, I'll end up with a second one.

 

[carage]

Lets see here:

AMD make both discrete GPUs and APUs with IGPs.
Nvidia make discrete GPUs.

Because of this, the total market share is bigger for AMD. But Nvidia make big profit, while AMD barely makes profit on GPUs while losing big bucks on APUs/CPUs, which nets them a loss quarter after quarter.
Who is in the better situation here you think?

I could go on war against the shops selling TVs. They sell their TV for $500 and nets them $100 per Tv, but I can sell the same TV for $300 which makes me lose $100 per TV. I promise you I would sell a lot more and have way bigger market share, but in the end I lose although my sales and market share is bigger.

Then when AMD runs out of money they just go sue Intel and cry foul to the Government again.
Let's just hope the DoJ Antitrust division and the Federal Courts are still open when that happens. Wink Wink
Seriously, the Federal Court put out a notice yesterday claiming they only got 10 days of operational funds left.

 

[Cloudfire777]

Then when AMD runs out of money they just go sue Intel and cry foul to the Government again.
Let's just hope the DoJ Antitrust division and the Federal Courts are still open when that happens. Wink Wink
Seriously, the Federal Court put out a notice yesterday claiming they only got 10 days of operational funds left.

It would be sad to see AMD go bankrupt but would almost be worth it just to see the reactions from some people

Yeah AMD is pretty far behind the competition. With AMD and Intel, while Intel was ahead of in the CPU department, AMD was winning with IGPs.
Mobile Haswell however took a knock out there too this year, so AMD is lacking on all areas now. And they still havent pushed out their Kaveri.

Luckily they have the price on the products on their side, but one cant stop but wonder if the margins are that great there for them.
Or maybe its just Nvidia and Intel charging big bucks to màke bigger profit. I dont know, I have never found the answer on that one.

 

[wand3r3r]

It would be sad to see AMD go bankrupt but would almost be worth it just to see the reactions from some people

Yeah AMD is pretty far behind the competition. With AMD and Intel, while Intel was ahead of in the CPU department, AMD was winning with IGPs.
Mobile Haswell however took a knock out there too this year, so AMD is lacking on all areas now. And they still havent pushed out their Kaveri.

Luckily they have the price on the products on their side, but one cant stop but wonder if the margins are that great there for them.
Or maybe its just Nvidia and Intel charging big bucks to màke bigger profit. I dont know, I have never found the answer on that one.

Are you in here to talk about mantle or just continually troll amd vs nv ot stuff?
(Applicable to a bunch of posters)

Get back on topic pls, I don't feel like following the war.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

It would be sad to see AMD go bankrupt but would almost be worth it just to see the reactions from some people

Yeah AMD is pretty far behind the competition. With AMD and Intel, while Intel was ahead of in the CPU department, AMD was winning with IGPs.
Mobile Haswell however took a knock out there too this year, so AMD is lacking on all areas now. And they still havent pushed out their Kaveri.

Luckily they have the price on the products on their side, but one cant stop but wonder if the margins are that great there for them.
Or maybe its just Nvidia and Intel charging big bucks to màke bigger profit. I dont know, I have never found the answer on that one.

Are you referring to reactions from people like you when your $150 performance level nvidia GPU is $800 because they got it and you want it because there is no competition.

 

[Selenium_Glow]

Anyways, I think the gist of it is this -> Wait for Mantle to actually come and see if it actually makes any difference. For now, AMD has the console advantage which could work in its favor.

Mantle has so far nothing to do with Nvidia. They could be coming up with something similar as we speak (or argue) or they may not care... I don't know like many of you out there.

But personally, in my opinion, I'd wish that AMD succeeds with it.

 

[Erenhardt]

Sooo... back on topic!

It would be sad to see AMD go bankrupt but would almost be worth it just to see the reactions from some people

Yeah AMD is pretty far behind the competition. With AMD and Intel, while Intel was ahead of in the CPU department, AMD was winning with IGPs.
Mobile Haswell however took a knock out there too this year, so AMD is lacking on all areas now. And they still havent pushed out their Kaveri.

Luckily they have the price on the products on their side, but one cant stop but wonder if the margins are that great there for them.
Or maybe its just Nvidia and Intel charging big bucks to màke bigger profit. I dont know, I have never found the answer on that one.

LoL WUT?! What Has fail mobile are you referring to? Did I miss something?

 

[RiDE]

I see the usual suspects are here...

(flamebait pic removed)

This is not 4chan, if you want 4chan please go to 4chan.

Admin IDC

 

[Idontcare]

Please keep your commentary and posts on-topic and germane to the purpose of this sticky thread.

Administrator Idontcare

 

[gorobei]

ooh ooh oh mr kotter mr kotter [raises hand] [raises hand]

so checking my comment about the upcoming amd dev summit oct 11-14, i came across a S/A article from july
http://semiaccurate.com/2013/07/17/keynotes-for-amd-developer-summit-2013-announced/
since this is pre mantle announcement, the dice bf4 block is listed as HSA memory benefits for games. looks like Johan Andersson will be giving the presentation, no indication of exact date.
http://developer.amd.com/apu/home/keynotes/

 

[SiliconWars]

Hm Helgason is there, maybe AMD has the Unity engine sewn up as well.

 

[csbin]

More game engines will support Mantle

Romanian online resource Lab501.ro published intervyus one of the managers of AMD Devon Nekechukom. During the interview, Devon Nekechuk said that about the second half of November, will announce several game engines that will support the new interface Mantle. These engines must demonstrate an unsurpassed level of performance of a new family of graphics cards AMD, with the support of API Mantle.

http://translate.google.com/transla...tografii-gpu-hawaii-i-videokarty-r9-290x.html

 

[24601]

More game engines will support Mantle

Romanian online resource Lab501.ro published intervyus one of the managers of AMD Devon Nekechukom. During the interview, Devon Nekechuk said that about the second half of November, will announce several game engines that will support the new interface Mantle. These engines must demonstrate an unsurpassed level of performance of a new family of graphics cards AMD, with the support of API Mantle.

http://translate.google.com/transla...tografii-gpu-hawaii-i-videokarty-r9-290x.html

Hopefully it gets support in MMOs going forward, considering their primary limit is draw calls (if they are properly >>massively<< multiplayer).

Even something like Firefall runs into massive draw call issues on AMD hardware since their drivers don't support multithreaded draw calls.

This issue reared it's head massively in the Battlefield 4 beta that is going on right now.

As I have said before and have always said. Nvidia cards always run better on AMD CPUs than equivalent AMD cards. This is because Nvidia drivers properly support multithreaded draw calls.

Here is some sweet sweet irony for those who trust only what AMD tells them

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33976244

Note that this was penned directly by an AMD PR representative.

https://twitter.com/cavemanjim

 

[Grooveriding]

So Mantle in WoW ?

 

[24601]

So Mantle in WoW ?

No, WoW already spent massive capital putting multi-threaded draw calls into their game (which is one reason why Nvidia's advantage is absolutely insurmountable to AMD cards)

To see them duplicate that effort just because AMD can't be arsed to do the same with their drivers would be asinine, especially with a game that's almost dead.

EDIT: If you believe the rest of the stuff said in that thread on rage3d (and the AMD PR Representative seemed to), then it seems that AMD's piss-poor support (very high amount of crash-to-desktop level problems) for multi-threaded draw calls is the main reason why multi-threaded draw call support in the games of the past 1-2 years was scrapped.

This includes Battlefield 3, by the way.

 

[Haserath]

Why should we want Mantle in games if it only supports one architecture. PC doesn't keep one arch like consoles.

Nvidia went through G80, G200, GF100, and GK100 with 4 different architectures.

Even AMD had VLIW5, VLIW4, and GCN for the past 3.

So instead of evolving the arch, they'll rely on Mantle?

 

[24601]

Why should we want Mantle in games if it only supports one architecture. PC doesn't keep one arch like consoles.

Nvidia went through G80, G200, GF100, and GK100 with 4 different architectures.

Even AMD had VLIW5, VLIW4, and GCN for the past 3.

So instead of evolving the arch, they'll rely on Mantle?

Because it obviously only happens when AMD gives developers severe bucketloads of money, which is win-win in my book.

Also, think of all the people stuck with GCN cards that don't have multi-threaded drivers to go with them and how massive the draw calls will be in games like probably the next elder scrolls game and grand theft auto game.

 

[sontin]

So instead of evolving the arch, they'll rely on Mantle?

That's the plan. Designing new hardware cost a lot of money. Something AMD doesn't have - nVidia is investing around $900 millions into graphics R&D in this year. That is 66% of AMD's graphics revenue...

With a proprietary API they do not need to invest the same kind of money because there is no fair fight anymore between them and at least nVidia.