The AMD Mantle Thread

[sontin]

EA believes in $$$. They dont care about Mantle. They got money from AMD.
If EA cared about the PC they wouldn't release NfS with a 30FPS cap, kill the Fifa Manager series and release buggy games.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Explain to me again why somebody with a fast CPU wouldn't buy a 290X...or two...instead of a 780 Ti?

Overclocked 780ti is faster in other games one might play? Or they will go with a mid-range card waiting for 20nm? People have lots of choices.

 

[Stormflux]

Exactly. Mantle is still a niche (gcn cards), within a niche(very limited number of games), within a niche( minimal improvement except in CPU limited scenarios). If one is building a thousand dollar gaming rig, it is absurd to not get a powerful CPU that can perform well in all situations.

If one has a slow CPU, and the *only* demanding game he plays is BF4, then you will get a boost, but if you want to play other CPU demanding games, you will not be able to delay an upgrade because of mantle.

Been reading every post in this thread. I don't understand posts like these. Pointing out how niche it is. The same could be said for DX11.2, PhysX, TressFX, HairWorks, heck any NEW technology. Betas and Initial launches are just that, the start of something new. In Anands preview he too states that the GPU nature of Mantle really has not been flexed yet, and most of the improvements are on the CPU side.

It's already showing great promise and it could only improve from here. If the end result of Mantle is the adoption of a platform neutral open API (Linux, OSX, Windows, etc) or the decoupling of DX and advancement and adoption of OpenGL (VOGL, AMDs own effort) then all the better. Not to mention the fact that the minimum gains, performance and minimum hardware requirements get a boost is good for the industry.

If AMD actually follows through with the open nature of it, if they follow the movie vfx industry with recent standards like OpenVDB, OpenEXR and Alembic, then this can push the industry forward in a lot of ways.

Point is... it has to start somewhere. And this has been one of few interesting revelations on the PC Gaming side of things for the passed few years.

 

[ASM-coder]

EA believes in money, if it is costing money and time where they could ship it won't make it in the product.

No disagreement there. But since all Frostbite games will be designed with Mantle, some costs have been eliminated.

 

[Abwx]

Member Blaviken22 from hardware.fr , using a FX8150 and a 7970 OC.

DX

Mantle

 

[DaZeeMan]

RE: Games that will support Mantle

Many, Many pages ago I posted the list of the 20 games that AMD had referred to. All are accounted for, although a few of them don't have titles yet (unnamed projects).

DICE/Frostbite made up the majority of that list.

As for games that we will see shortly, well we have BF4 now, and Thief is scheduled for release later this month. The new Plants vs Zombies game is also supposed to support Mantle, when the PC version is released (Console version Feb 18th).

After those releases, I don't remember anything coming out for a few months yet. Here's the list I came up with many many pages ago...

1 - Besides Battlefield 4, other Frostbite engine franchises slated for Mantle support (according to the Frostbite folks) include:
2 - Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare (XBox Feb 18th, PC at a later date),
3- Dragon Age: Inquisition (Fall 2014),
4- a Mass Effect game (sometime in 2014 maybe?),
5- Need For Speed: Rivals (game available for PC now, no word yet on Mantle patch),
6- Mirror's Edge 2 (2015),
7- and Star Stars: Battlefront (2015).
8-14 The Frostbite folks claim there are another 7+ titles also under development utilizing Mantle.

Need for Speed is suspect, as it is already released (october 2013). That doesn't mean that the next sequal to NFS wouldn't have Mantle support, but that hasn't been specifically disclosed as of yet..

Other titles include
15- the 'Mars' game (working title, Nitrous engine),
16- the new Star Control (Nitrous),
17- another unnamed Nitrous title,
18- Thief (Feb 2014),
19- Sniper Elite III (TBA 2014),
20- Star Citizen (end of 2014/2015).

That's 19 titles plus maybe NFS.
1 is released,
two more tbr shortly, and
16 others a number of months from now.

So yeah, it'll be a bit before we see a significant number of games for Mantle support. Which is good, as it'll give the Mantle drivers plenty of time to mature between now and when they are released.

 

[OCGuy]

They cant because the slide is also about mantle, not only FB3..

That said you should read what is written on the slide..

Mantle isn't automatic. The engine will be able to support it, if the individual game developers choose to use it.

Very tricky wording to say "X games will support Mantle" instead of "X games will feature Mantle"

 

[mikk]

From the tests it is obvious AMDs driver can't cope as good with a high drawcall count as Nvidia under directx.

 

[caswow]

From the tests it is obvious AMDs driver can't cope as good with a high drawcall count as Nvidia under directx.

what tests?

 

[mikk]

what tests?

Star Swarm and BF4 tests.

 

[caswow]

What BF4 Tests? Star Swarm is a Mantle Demo.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Explain to me again why somebody with a fast CPU wouldn't buy a 290X...or two...instead of a 780 Ti?

Did you even read what I said? I said mantle would not affect my choice of a *CPU*. I never said someone would not buy a 290X to pair with a fast CPU. However, since you brought it up, mantle would only be a minor consideration even in a gpu purchase to me because of the limited game support. This is because I am not into BF4 multi player, and the only announced game that really interests me is the new Dragon Age. If one is really into BF4, obviously mantle would be a bigger consideration in the choice of a gpu.

 

[Enigmoid]

Member Blaviken22 from hardware.fr , using a FX8150 and a 7970 OC.

DX

Mantle

Different positions of the player.

Can't tell anything from extremely dynamic instances unless you are averaging them over a period of time.

 

[ASM-coder]

From the tests it is obvious AMDs driver can't cope as good with a high drawcall count as Nvidia under directx.

Is this something that you believe has just been revealed?

 

[mikk]

What BF4 Tests? Star Swarm is a Mantle Demo.

Which runs on directx as well.

Star Swarm is mostly CPU bound and everyone would expect 290x running close to a 780 Ti but the latter runs 26% faster. Even a 770 is 21% faster. BF4 benchmarks from pclab were posted already:

The same issue is obvious in pCARS which is much more CPU demanding than BF4. AMD runs like crap in CPU bound tests. A dev told that AMD "requires substantially more CPU power in DX11 to render any given scene" and that AMD requires around 25% more CPU power to equate Nvidia. This is obvious in all these CPU bound tests. GPU tests are mostly GPU limited, that's why it isn't an issue usually.

 

[gdansk]

So 14.1 reduced all my frame rates in everything except BF4. My R9 290 went from Unigine Valley 64fps to 31fps and COH2 56fps to 32fps.

Anyone else have this issue? Reverting to 13.12 fixed it.

 

[ASM-coder]

However, since you brought it up, mantle would only be a minor consideration even in a gpu purchase to me because of the limited game support. This is because I am not into BF4 multi player, and the only announced game that really interests me is the new Dragon Age.

So if Dragon Age gets Mantle support, you might be interested?

 

[Enigmoid]

Looks GPU bound on mantle on the R270, 280 and 290.

 

[ASM-coder]

So 14.1 reduced all my frame rates in everything except BF4. Unigine 64fps to 31fps and COH2 56fps to 32fps.

Anyone else have this issue? Reverting to 13.12 fixed it.

Ouchy. Naughty AMD. I'm sure that won't go unnoticed.
There were a number of fixes in that driver, including frame pacing and HSA support for Kaveri, so there could be a number of causes.

 

[mikk]

Looks GPU bound on mantle on the R270, 280 and 290.

Look at the small 280x-->290x gap. This is a heavy CPU limit here. Otherwise Mantle couldn't double the fps.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

Why is everyone saying that Need For Speed: Rivals isn't getting mantle...

That slide says Need For Speed, nothing whatsoever about Rivals. They are not going to put it into that game because it was done long before Mantle's alpha test (bf4) was even ready for Mantle.

Stop with the FUD nonsense. Anyone with even the slightest clue would realize that they are talking about upcoming NFS games and not the last 15 years of NFS titles...

 

[Lonyo]

So you mean Mass Effect 1-3 and Mirror's Edge aren't getting Mantle either?

 

[Imouto]

So you mean Mass Effect 1-3 and Mirror's Edge aren't getting Mantle either?

Mirror's Edge 2 is in development.

About time.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

So you mean Mass Effect 1-3 and Mirror's Edge aren't getting Mantle either?

Oh the humanity.

 

[tential]

ahahah 2 fps gain for 7950 yeah but it's true not even 20% performance gain .... dissapointed ..

I think someone just posted that the HD7000/8000 series and the 260/270 weren't fully optimized yet. This whole release is RIDDLED with confusion.