AMD Mantle Investigation

[beebskadoo]

Frankly I don't care about Mantle in particular but I DO care about the draw-call issue being fixed... and if Mantle is the vehicle that carries us there then I'm on board!

 

If Nvidia or someone else comes up with a different solution well I'll probably be on-board with that as well, especially if it doesn't push segmentation and increased developer workload

Though I have heard people say that Nvidia's OpenGL extensions do similar things to MANTLE.

As you said the draw calls are the important thing! The first time I heard that the drawcalls on the Xbox 360 were orders of magnitude better than on PC my jaw just dropped. We need a propper solution, and like you said I don't care where it comes from but make it open!

Fragmentation is what is killing the industry IMHO, Nvidia needs to get onboard with this or something like this and make it an open platform, or we as the consuumer will have to suffer from half-assed solutions that only work with one GPU type.

 

it's certainly interesting times in the world of PC gaming.

[RedRound2]

I have a Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 3GB with i7 3770K

 

I got impressive results with Mantle in Star Swarm.

With DirectX my average FPS was 27.7 with frames dropping below 10 in graphic intensive scenes while with Mantle my average was 45 FPS with frames never dropping below 30

 

Overall Mantle does look promising and I wish all developers would take advantage of it

[luv2spoon]

Do you guys know why star swarm wont run on my PC. It said that "StarSwarm_Mantle.exe has stopped working" and I have an AMD 290X with 14.1 Beta driver as well.

[haroldfi]

Hard to say to be honest. G-SYNC requires a fancy new monitor that isn't available yet.

 

Mantle requires a fancy new graphics card or APU (to really get the most of it), a shoddy CPU, and games that aren't available yet.

 

My enthusiasm for both has been damped significantly since my initial excitement.

Mantle doesn't require a new graphics or a shoddy CPU... please better learn the theory behind

7000 series is not a new graphics...the real issue, rather, is that: if they started to develop Mantle since 2-3 years ago they did wrong to not show better results with 7xxx since the first release...

and above all is weird if in 3 years they still don't have an efficient "thin driver", BUT if the theory is exact is not all about fps gains compared to something already released for D3D, not suitable for significant changes in stroke 

that is, one thing is a patch after a D3D game which doesn't change its structure and its dynamics, another thing is to develop something with Mantle already in mind...

infact, the best results in BF4, however, will be seen in a scenario where calculations and objects on the screen at the same time are huge... (e.g. MP 64 players with all that this concerns...) and multigpu rigs (when it will work as expected)

why a shoddy CPU is not really required? 'cause in equal initial conditions while in D3D you can do a certain number of draw calls with the old DX parallelism, with Mantle you can do many more draw calls without a performance hit with a linear use of multicores...the multithreading parallelism in Mantle is different. It could mean a quality and complexity of the scenes never seen before...Then, we have to consider another important aspect of the situation...if the thin driver will be mature, the optimizations and the multigpu profiles etc. will be done by application side only (this is a revolution, 'cause ATM for every single game title AMD and Nvidia must do optimizations on their side...so it means that the gamer always has to wait for new drivers as usual, download, uninstall, reboot, reinstall...wait wait wait... it's a mess with D3D because the usual drivers have different tasks to do ...) don't you understand what this means?

indeed, the better bench now is Star Swarm and not BF4... the real issue at AMD is that they have to do a better job with the drivers team, and also faster...

[justast]

Do you guys know why star swarm wont run on my PC. It said that "StarSwarm_Mantle.exe has stopped working" and I have an AMD 290X with 14.1 Beta driver as well.

Mine didn't work because the Integrated Video Card was enabled. Once I dissabled that it started to run. Try it.

[SlyTactix]

@LinusTech @Slick   Could you guys do a Mantle video comparing results with an AMD CPU and GPU Combo? I've been seeing greater results with systems with FX8350 and 290's due to far more efficient utilization of the CPU's 8 Threads. Just food for thought.

[Slick]

@LinusTech @Slick   Could you guys do a Mantle video comparing results with an AMD CPU and GPU Combo? I've been seeing greater results with systems with FX8350 and 290's due to far more efficient utilization of the CPU's 8 Threads. Just food for thought.

Maybe once the driver is out of beta and there are other games to test...there are a lot of problems atm

[CCap]

Right now it sounds as though games will adopt mantle into their games, but there really isn't any confirmation that there will even be platform-wide adoption. I just hope that this won't be another PhysX... Before we get into that argument, it's still in beta, and I'm eager to see how this works when it is a final product, rather than it's awkward windows vista state. (for clarification purposes it's a metaphor. Don't take it literally)

[ShaTR]

Still havn't seen any CPU specific tests for mantle. I know there are problems right now because of lack of support and beta drivers, but the ultimate reason for mantle is eliminating the CPU bottleneck, especially those present in AMD CPU/APU's. That's what i'm waiting for more than anything else.

 

For example; how does mantle perform when using a R9 290X on a

 

Low end AMD APU

High end AMD APU

Low end Intel CPU

High end Intel CPU

 

If games perform relatively the same on an AMD APU as an intel, we should see intel CPU prices drop, and maybe more K series sku's as well. Who wouldn't LOVE an unlocked I3 eh

[luv2spoon]

Mine didn't work because the Integrated Video Card was enabled. Once I dissabled that it started to run. Try it.

Thanks. I did have my intel HD4600 on. I'll try it now and see if it works.

[gligoran]

Mantel is an API built to reduce the required interactions with the CPU meaning the CPU can be working with other things and you will still get killer frames, if the CPU had more than enough time to respond to everything the video card was asking for in the first place you will see no improvement. In theory It allows CPU to focus on tasks that they couldn't before because they needed to be ready to tell the GPU what to do or your frame rate would crash.

 

Oh, OK, so Mental doesn't increase the performance if the GPU is the bottleneck. If the CPU is, however, it does, as the game doesn't have to go through DirectX to issue commands to the GPU. Thanks.

[PortentousLad]

The results were basically a total mess. Impossible to conclude anything other than "well, it's BETA"

I guess I'll keep waiting then...

 

Or go 750ti and G-Sync - the choices!

[m00ndancer]

Still havn't seen any CPU specific tests for mantle. I know there are problems right now because of lack of support and beta drivers, but the ultimate reason for mantle is eliminating the CPU bottleneck, especially those present in AMD CPU/APU's. That's what i'm waiting for more than anything else.

 

For example; how does mantle perform when using a R9 290X on a

 

Low end AMD APU

High end AMD APU

Low end Intel CPU

High end Intel CPU

 

If games perform relatively the same on an AMD APU as an intel, we should see intel CPU prices drop, and maybe more K series sku's as well. Who wouldn't LOVE an unlocked I3 eh

 

 

I have AMD Phenom II X4 965 Be and a Gigabyte Windforce 3X OC R9 290.

A low to med tier CPU with a high tier GPU.

This is my results from the Star Swarm test I did. I used the follow test in ultra mode @ 1920x1080

 

D3D 21,07 FPS 1392 (1596-204) MB GFX mem

Mantle 50,86 FPS 2023 (2230-207) MB GFX mem

 

So one of the things that will impact your Mantle scores are how much memory you have onboard. A 2GB card wont cut it, unless you lower the settings. (The 200 value is the mem that Windows 7 uses)

[haroldfi]

So one of the things that will impact your Mantle scores are how much memory you have onboard. A 2GB card wont cut it, unless you lower the settings. (The 200 value is the mem that Windows 7 uses)

yes, but ATM... the reason is that some cards (e.g. 7000 or 270 with 2GB Vram) are not yet optimized...

http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/Mantle-Known-Issues.aspx

(sincerely IMHO they didn't even tested those cards)

so nobody ever required 3 or 4GB... 'cause it would be a mistake (and Repi on twitter never said such a thing), also considering the resolution you're running...at 1080p there is no good reason to do it, in this case you would force all users to buy a 290/x and they can't do this...it would be like shoot oneself in the foot 

[m00ndancer]

yes, but ATM... the reason is that some cards (e.g. 7000 or 270 with 2GB Vram) are not yet optimized...

http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/Mantle-Known-Issues.aspx

(sincerely IMHO they didn't even tested those cards)

so nobody ever required 3 or 4GB... 'cause it would be a mistake (and Repi on twitter never said such a thing), also considering the resolution you're running...at 1080p there is no good reason to do it, in this case you would force all users to buy a 290/x and they can't do this...it would be like shoot oneself in the foot

Yes they can, the 7xxx/270/280 cards are old

 

Seriously, if you want get the most out of it, you will need the latest cards. Don't expect to be able to play games on extreme settings on anything less than the 290/x. High on the other hand should work out fine. 

There are other diffences as well in the architecture between the 290 and the rest of the cards (GCN 1.1 vs 1.0) that might give less a boost for the lower end cards. So it's not just gfx memory but it's a part of it.

[haroldfi]

Yes they can, the 7xxx/270/280 cards are old

 

Seriously, if you want get the most out of it, you will need the latest cards. Don't expect to be able to play games on extreme settings on anything less than the 290/x. High on the other hand should work out fine. 

There are other diffences as well in the architecture between the 290 and the rest of the cards (GCN 1.1 vs 1.0) that might give less a boost for the lower end cards. So it's not just gfx memory but it's a part of it.

you're showing that you don't know anything about marketing...and the r line is old just on the paper ('cause you know it) but not for sales matter...they are in production NOW, the purpose by a vendor is to earn most $ possible

question: e.g. do you prefer to sell 50x 290 only OR 50x 290 + 250x 280 + 250x 270 and so on and to keep your loyal users ? please, do better your maths

[m00ndancer]

Thing is, there are one game so far that supports Mantle. I don't expect Mantle to be ready for non beta until the next iteration of gfx cards and they will all have GCN 1.1 and probably be scaled down versions of the R9. The only card besides the 290 that is "current" gen is the 260X (7790). The bulk of the buyers won't really care about Mantle unless it's a game they are waiting for. Most AAA games (IMHO) in a year or so will require 3 GB or more to run on Extreme settings @ 1080p. The market for discreet GPU is a small one compared to what's out there. Kaveri and the console versions with APU are going to represent a lot more money than GPUs in the future when they move to unified memory. Have a look at the PS4 8GB DDR5 unified memory, a developers dream. It's going to be a polarisation on the market, highend GPU or an APU. Nvidia is going the same route. But that's just my opinion not the truth by any means.