The AMD Mantle Thread

[chimaxi83]

Not for anything, but we've had really really good audio for at least a decade and a half now.

Oh, cool. What's your point?

 

[VulgarDisplay]

Not for anything, but we've had really really good audio for at least a decade and a half now.

Would really great audio be better than really good? Who knows this could be the real deal and we will have to wait and see.

 

[Final8ty]

http://semiaccurate.com/2013/10/09/like-mantle-amds-trueaudio-massive-step-forward/

And then there is the part about the XBox One and Playstation 4 tie-ins, that is where TrueAudio really shines. Lets take a look at these because they are the killer apps for AMD

 

[PPB]

True audio could be a killer feature for a couple of genres, fps being on of those that come to my mind right now. Bf3 was totally lacking in the depth and positioning in what you were hearing, anyone who played for more than a day can tell you you couldnt hear footsteps from behind, igot knifed and i knifed a great deal thanks to this. Also, on CQ dlc it was really annoying not to be able to distinguish which floor that firing and those explosions were coming from.

 

[DooKey]

The return of Glide and EAX sure are making the faithful foam at the mouth. I just don't get it.

 

[blackened23]

I don't think it's a fair comparison. Keep in mind that Glide was introduced during a time when Direct3D didn't exist - every separate 3d chipset in the mid 90s required a native API, and there was no unified API for which they all worked. So basically you had rendition with their own API, 3dfx with theirs, powerVR with theirs, so on and so forth. Meanwhile, there was no D3D.

The situation is different now - the way I understand it is, AMD is trying to get mantle into multi platform engines and all of these engines still have DX11 support. Think Unreal engine, Cryengine, Frostbite 3, stuff along those lines - DX11.x isn't going away. Mantle is just a companion to it, and we don't know A) how it performs and B) if AMD can indeed make Mantle take off with integration into various 3d engines. Regardless, it isn't like the 3dfx era where if you had a non 3dfx 3d card, you were screwed. I remember the rendition Vertite had vQuake and that was....about it. Meanwhile you had way more games on the 3dfx voodoo - this isn't the same situation. Everyone has 3d acceleration via DirectX 11.x, and it isn't going away. Conversely, the 1996 situation was there was no unified API and there were 6 proprietary APIs competing with each other. Back in those days, choosing the wrong 3d acceletator meant you were left in the cold if it wasn't 3dfx due to the complete lack of a usable universal API. That isn't the case anymore.

That said, this is AMD software we're talking about and i'm still waiting for AMD to prove themselves worthy in terms of software. I think the concept for Mantle is great, but AMD has a lot of work to do in terms of whether it takes off or not, and that is still very much in the air. I don't know if AMD can make "Mantle" happen just based on their history. But I hope they can - they need value added features as nvidia has with TXAA and physx. Because of this (AMD's software history), the 290/X cards will solely be judged by DX11.x performance at launch. December could change that, but I don't think anyone will judge the 290/X from the outset by Mantle.

 

[DooKey]

How soon people forget. DX and Glide co-existed at the same time. 3dfx originally made their splash by support OGL, GL_Quake anyone? After that Glide started to pop up in a few games. MS didn't wait too long and established D3D and this along with Nvidia killed off 3dfx. IMO Nvidia killed off 3dfx by supporting 32 bit color vs. 16 bit for Glide and supporting D3D and not to mention 3dfx buying STB and losing their partners. Anyway, very few games were Glide specific. The games that had Glide support were few and far between. Mantle is Glide revisited. Developers simply won't support 2 separate APIs unless they are paid to do it. History is your guide.

 

[Paul98]

How soon people forget. DX and Glide co-existed at the same time. 3dfx originally made their splash by support OGL, GL_Quake anyone? After that Glide started to pop up in a few games. MS didn't wait too long and established D3D and this along with Nvidia killed off 3dfx. IMO Nvidia killed off 3dfx by supporting 32 bit color vs. 16 bit for Glide and supporting D3D. Anyway, very few games were Glide specific. The games that had Glide support were few and far between. Mantle is Glide revisited. Developers simply won't support 2 separate APIs unless they are paid to do it. History is your guide.

Except they already have to support two, Mantle wouldn't do much if both PS4, and xbone didn't both have something similar. The only reason this has a chance is because of this. Most of the main graphics programming that is done on console will be transferable to the PC using mantle. Or if starting on the PC using mantle easy to port over to the PC side.

This won't be around for all that long obviously since it's only used with GCN, but if it does add enough of an upgrade to these games we could see something similar in the future with more universal support.

 

[blackened23]

How soon people forget. DX and Glide co-existed at the same time. 3dfx originally made their splash by support OGL, GL_Quake anyone? After that Glide started to pop up in a few games. MS didn't wait too long and established D3D and this along with Nvidia killed off 3dfx. IMO Nvidia killed off 3dfx by supporting 32 bit color vs. 16 bit for Glide and supporting D3D. Anyway, very few games were Glide specific. The games that had Glide support were few and far between. Mantle is Glide revisited. Developers simply won't support 2 separate APIs unless they are paid to do it. History is your guide.

I literally have no idea what you're talking about. Were you a PC gamer at the time? Around 1996? It sounds like you weren't. Let me explain what the situation really was:

I bought a 3dfx voodoo when it was released in 1996 so I remember the situation quite well. There was no D3D from the outset. It was being developed but it was not usable, very few games had "3d acceleration" and there quite a few DOS games being developed. In fact, many developers did not want to develop for Windows 95 at the time and wanted to continue using DOS as a games dev platform.

The first 3d game of note was Quake. Rendition had vQuake, 3dfx had GLquake through the GL wrapper. Other specific games had 3d acceleration, but those that did were generally only via one 3d API. I remember Tomb Raider at launch only supported the powerVR, while it did not support glide or rendition. Conversely, rendition had vQuake and that was about it. Rendition's verite chipset never quite caught on because the performance wasn't there, although the image quality was excellent. In the early days there certainly wasn't a standard, it wasn't like it is now. It took years for D3D to stabilize and become usable, and proprietary APIs were the NORM for games that had 3d at all. Many games still did not. In fact, the vast majority of games at the time DIDN'T have 3d and still relied on software rendering - and those with 3d acceleration generally had 1 proprietary API. It took quite a long time for the D3D situation to stabilize and become usable. At the outset? 3dfx voodoo was the king, everything else was irrelevant.

In any case, 3dfx did not DIE because of glide. When D3D became usable, 3dfx supported D3D like everything else. Quite the revisionist history you have there. 3dfx died because they bought STB and voodoo 3 was a piece of junk compared to the Riva TNT. They were up to their ears in debt and had no proper answer to the products that nvidia was churning out at the time, this is why 3dfx died. Not because of glide. Your version of events is an extreme revisionist history or you weren't a PC gamer back then.

 

[DooKey]

Nope, I was around. I never said there was D3D from the outset. I ran every 3dfx card made and loved them.

Yes, at the beginning the 3d chipsets had their own API.

Are you telling me you don't remember D3D coming along and NV running that? NV never ran anything but D3D and OGL.

3dfx died because they were viewed as inferior for not supporting 32 bit color and because they bought STB. Both contributed.

I agree with you about Glide. It didn't kill 3dfx.

My point about Glide is most developers didn't support Glide because they wanted to support D3D since the mainstream vendors supported that and more people could play their games. Two code paths cost money.

So where did I revise things?

 

[blackened23]

Maybe I misinterpreted what you mentioned. If so, my mistake. I agree with you about the TNT and TNT2 one upping 3dfx - the voodoo 3 was not a good product IMHO. The dithering / 16-32 bit color situation did not help nor did the STB purchase. I agree in those respects.

As far as glide goes, it isn't the same situation IMHO. Glide was created out of necessity. D3D was also new and the bottlenecks associated with it were not prevalent then, certainly nothing like it is now. The way AMD is targeting Mantle from my understanding is they are putting it in multiplatform game engines which power the majority of games. None of these engines, of which there are 3-4, are losing DirectX.

The other fact is game development has changed as well. Back in the 90s, there were tons and tons of PC only game franchises - however, since that time, development costs have increased to an extent to which multi platform games are a necessity now just to break even on many game franchises. This is why the PC gets console ports now, whereas back in the late 90s that wasn't really the case. The PC had a *ton* of PC only games back in those days, whereas much to our chagrin now that isn't necessarily the case. Certainly not with AAA titles. So the situation now is, we have 3-4 game engines (UE3, Cry Engine, Frostbite, etc) that power 85% of the multi platform games for both PCs and consoles - this also was not the case in the 90s. The only licensed engine back then to an appreciable extent was the quake engine , and that was generally only for PC games. Anyway, because of the cross platform development that is common now AND because the same 3-4 game engines power over 80% of games, that is how Mantle can *potentially* be utilized. AMD only needs to get it into engines, nothing more. It's not a situation where a developer would remove DX11.x in favor of mantle, all of these engines have DX11 already.

So basically the glide comparison isn't the same because game development has changed. Cross platform and multi platform development is the norm now, and wasn't back then. To get glide into games, 3dfx had to talk to individual developers. AMD doesn't have to do this. They only need to get it into the game engines that power the majority of games. Nearly every AAA title these days is a cross development and multiplatform game, and most of these games use the same game engines. UE3 is the most popular. That is what AMD is targeting Mantle towards.

 

[stahlhart]

This thread is for discussing Mantle, not Glide. We're getting derailed here.
-- stahlhart

 

[DooKey]

I guess we'll just have to wait to see how it turns out. My fear is it's going to fragment the gaming development community once NV comes out with their low level API. Some engines will have one and some will have the other. The company with the most money to pay for it wins.

 

[frozentundra123456]

I guess we'll just have to wait to see how it turns out. My fear is it's going to fragment the gaming development community once NV comes out with their low level API. Some engines will have one and some will have the other. The company with the most money to pay for it wins.

Not to mention we now seem to have a Windows 8 vs 7 issue as well. I was giving MS a kudo for supporting all hardware, but now they are being just as bad by only giving DX11.2 to win8.

 

[uclaLabrat]

I guess we'll just have to wait to see how it turns out. My fear is it's going to fragment the gaming development community once NV comes out with their low level API. Some engines will have one and some will have the other. The company with the most money to pay for it wins.

Nvidia really has no reason to, they already have directX, and the entire reason mantle makes sense is the huge install base of the consoles, which Nvidia can't leverage.

 

[MeldarthX]

Not for anything, but we've had really really good audio for at least a decade and a half now.

That's got to be one of the most BS things I've heard you say Keys. Keys this isn't an attack; if it seems like it sorry but truth is we haven't. Seriously we haven't had good audio since it was ripped out in Vista.

Compare games that had EAX - then listen to games after vista its night and bloody day.

This brings it back - if you haven't watched the youtube video.....seriously do and then you'll understand.

No we haven't had good audio. We've had basic audio; we did have good audio before MS decided to kill it....now we're getting damn good audio again.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Thought blog:

http://www.ign.com/videos/2013/02/21/havok-engine-demo

Will Mantle bring GPU accelerated physics effects to PC?

 

[ShintaiDK]

Thought blog:

http://www.ign.com/videos/2013/02/21/havok-engine-demo

Will Mantle bring GPU accelerated physics effects to PC?

AMD supports physics via DirectCompute and OpenCL. Else they could just use Stream that is AMDs version of Cuda.

For Havok:

 

[BallaTheFeared]

I figured you were here to rain on my parade

 

[ShintaiDK]

I figured you were here to rain on my parade

If you think it's going to rain, it will.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Indeed :thumbsup:

 

[MightyMalus]

Will Mantle bring GPU accelerated physics effects to PC?

Well, on one of the slides it said that Mantle would leverage all of the hardware, no?
(Going by memory)
Maybe that means that Mantle is the one API for GCN. Graphics, Compute and Audio.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Looks like AMD is trying to get bullet and havok into the fray, this is good.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Looks like AMD is trying to get bullet and havok into the fray, this is good.

ATI/AMD have promised physics for ages. But still not there. So I wouldnt expect anything anytime soon. Seems it pops up every 2-3 years since 2006.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

It's raining again