Mantle demonstrates smoother gameplay in Civ 5 Beyond Earth (& what it means for the industry)

[Notional]

You can have your Mantle and when Witcher 3 comes out I will enjoy the PhysX.  Nvidia .. play games the way they are meant to be played.

[BallGum]

I don't understand why you would ever even want to have a high framerate in Civ games. Sure it's nice, but you have all the time in the world to make your next move, it's not like someone with 10fps has an inherent disadvantage to someone with 60fps.

 

Sort of irrelevant to talk about performance numbers at all with this game imo. Let alone how it makes one graphics card sellers technology better than another. Okay, you can run BF4 and Civ;BE with 10 more frames per second, woop-de-doo.

 

True but it cant hurt to play on a nice framerate. It's definitely annoying to me to play Civ 5 that keeps alternating between 60 fps and 30fps.

[brownninja97]

good on amd, i dont care as im not a fan of the civ series

[smjpl]

You can have your Mantle and when Witcher 3 comes out I will enjoy the PhysX.  Nvidia .. play games the way they are meant to be played.

 

Wow! Way to come off looking like a fanboy. You even quoted their marketing slogan. LOL

 

Also I hate being accused of the fan boy/fan war thing.  I have liked AMD for certain things over time and I have bought an AMD cpu in recent years and have in the past.  I also had a 7850 1 GB video card for my son at one point.  I don't hate AMD so don't start a flame war.  I named my daughter after AMD btw.

 

This doesn't make you look like any less of a fanboy; it just looks like you switch sides a lot.

 

I am not saying you are fanboy but jeez man, give AMD and game devs some credit when they do something good. Any advancement towards better gaming experiences is good for us. No matter if it comes from the Green or Red team.

[PhantomChevron]

You can have your Mantle and when Witcher 3 comes out I will enjoy the PhysX.  Nvidia .. play games the way they are meant to be played.

 

 

Congratulations on cherry picking one game to try and proove a point in what you are saying.  Let me see other titles where Mantle shows this.

 

And thanks to this guy, I have grown a disliking for nvidia and the useless shit PhysX

[x-eagleeye-x]

You can have your Mantle and when Witcher 3 comes out I will enjoy the PhysX.  Nvidia .. play games the way they are meant to be played.

 

It's always amusing when this type of "gamer" comments and contributes absolutely nothing to the topic, and pleasures himself by yelling "All hail PhysX!" Do you also use the plastic wrap of your GPU for "protection"?

 

Fantastic gains I with Mantle. Nothing out of this world, but the minimum FPS is astonishing. I hope this tech matures even more. I don't even care if DX12 will introduce something like this. The more choices gamers have, we win. Plain and simple.

[smjpl]

I hope this tech matures even more. I don't even care if DX12 will introduce something like this. The more choices gamers have, we win. Plain and simple.

 

Didn't I hear something about OpenGL adopting some of the features of Mantle as standards? The more coverage Mantle gets, the more we could see a shift from games being DX only. Well, one can hope anyway.

[nick99n]

You can have your Mantle and when Witcher 3 comes out I will enjoy the PhysX.  Nvidia .. play games the way they are meant to be played.

the way they are meant to be played i really laughed at this 

on topic now : 

not bad amd but i saw some benchmarks were really bad at CF+mantle config while single gpu was really fast ( in some cases it even had more fps than the dual gpu setup)

[Humbug]

Didn't I hear something about OpenGL adopting some of the features of Mantle as standards?

At a high level the goals of the OpenGL Next project are similar to the goals of Mantle. Below is the vision according to a statement from the Kronos group

Key directions for the new ground-up design include explicit application control over GPU and CPU workloads for performance and predictability, a multithreading-friendly API with greatly reduced overhead, a common shader program intermediate language, and a strengthened ecosystem focus that includes rigorous conformance testing.

 

So their goals are very similar to Mantle, whether they will take a similar approach to achieve those goals remains to be seen. We know that AMD has given them access to Mantle, it's probably a useful case-study for them.

 

I really hope OpenGL next succeeds because it's the one API which can unify all hardware vendors and all OS ecosystems at the same time. Also  I hope that the point about more rigrous conformance testing means that we can move away from Nvidia and AMD having to tweak their drivers for every single AAA game release in order to maximize performance.

 

When you look at the contributors to the OpenGL next initiative, the list is very impressive (below). I just hope that they can work together and get things done fast, hope it doesn't become a case of too many cooks and too many opinions.

[MasterRaceFanBoy]

It is indeed a good thing, and I hope they will get double the performance by the end of 2015, but with dx12 the gtx 980 will pretty much perform better than r290x with the current mantle.

[Ren]

I do talk about other things but I am passionate about a company that makes games look better and PhysX does that.  Seriously if you look at my history of posts I do talk about other things.  I talk about gaming experiences, try to help people with pc builds although the other day I was horrible at it, and I bash SSDs for gamers.  Hmmmm what else do I do?  I report spam.  I bash multi-monitor use as bezels are awful.  I talk in off topic about music and other things.

Cancerous user.

I'm more excited about Star Citizen now with this coming out.

[ComradeHX]

 Maybe because this is an RTS game with a lot going on for the CPU to do.

 

u wot m8?

[KenJimmY]

so that means when DX12 comes out .. the 980 will still be the best card atm , right ? .. since Mantle is kinda like dx12 but for AMD .. sooo i don't see the point of that graph , unless they wanna show that NOW there's what op stated .

[Humbug]

so that means when DX12 comes out .. the 980 will still be the best card atm , right ?

by the time dx12 games Come out there will be better cards than the 980. That's not the point. The point is the entire industry and us the gamers stand to gain with the new generation of APIs.

[BonSie]

There is a follow up by Anandtech on Crossfire, and the results are interesting:

 

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8643/civilization-beyond-earth-crossfire-with-mantle-sfr-not-actually-broken

 

 

 

 

Less average but higher minimum and more stability.

[deathjester]

You can have your Mantle and when Witcher 3 comes out I will enjoy the PhysX.  Nvidia .. play games the way they are meant to be played.

 

Oh lord.

 

Another reason I love having a 4770k with a R9 290. To make people like this mad. BTW my Sapphire R9 290 is fantastic and better than I hoped it would be. It has been a long time since I had a AMD GPU and I am currently playing through Mass Effect 2 at a 5120x2880 Gedosato downsample with 4k texmods.

 

So if you want to pay a ton for a GTX 980 that gets flat out beat by 5 FPS by a good brand R9 290 at higher resolutions (downsampling/supersampling) in Ryse? Be my guest. It is your money. The REFERENCE 290 also beat the GTX 970 in LTT benchmarks of Mordor at 4k and that is an Nvidia title. 

 

http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Ryse-PC-259308/Specials/Test-Technik-1138543/

 

Click the 1.5 and 2.5 supersampling benchmarks. It is just downsampling. Also remember that most benchmarks use REFERENCE R9 290's that were horrible on temps and throttled. The benchmarks are heavily slanted. I think the GTX 970 and 980 are FANTASTIC gpu's, and I love what Nvidia is doing with Nvidia DSR, just like I love what AMD is doing with Mantle. IF I had a small form factor PC? I would definitely grab a GTX 970. If I was going a SLI build? I might go two GTX 980's instead since I would probably have to water cool the two R9 290's. Then again I can make a custom loop so I would probably just go with the two R9 290's,

 

Single card? GG Nvidia. Reason why? Download GPU-Z and look at bandwidth. I just came from a GTX 770 btw and Physx was only good in Planetside 2 and they took those effects out. Why? Cus the PS4 has a AMD GPU and so does the Xbox One. As far as Witcher 3? I am just hoping the game isn't an unoptimized piece of crap like Watch Dogs was. Any "game works" title atm scares me on ANY brand GPU. Looking at the pc requirements of Acreed Unity? Games Works strikes again.

 

I am worried Nvidia is going to ruin Witcher 3, not make it better on their hardware. Also my GTX 770 was a MESS in Tomb Raider at release. Nvidia will have driver problems this gen as well since both consoles use AMD cards. The difference is, Nvidia will change shader libraries to get an edge and destroy their own game for a few measly FPS on an unoptimized POS game. I can understand being a fan of Nvidia due to performance, temps, power usage. Their BS policies and "video card mafia" tactics (which is what a former valve employee called them)? No.  I don't even want to give Nvidia money at this point. 

[EpicAdom]

You can have your Mantle and when Witcher 3 comes out I will enjoy the PhysX.  Nvidia .. play games the way they are meant to be played.

The bias is real

[Darkman]

Good for them!  The 290X can finally beat a card.

Wait a second.. When the next flagship from AMD comes out, what will the performance be like to a 980 with the AMD GPU running mantle? O_o

[Humbug]

@deathjester can you give me a link on how to do the downsampling hack for Mass Effect 1?

[Techhog]

You can have your Mantle and when Witcher 3 comes out I will enjoy the PhysX.  Nvidia .. play games the way they are meant to be played.

Is this a serious post, or just bait? I must have an answer

[AlwaysFSX]

Wait a second.. When the next flagship from AMD comes out, what will the performance be like to a 980 with the AMD GPU running mantle? O_o

Probably a few percent better, I hope.

[Humbug]

Wait a second.. When the next flagship from AMD comes out, what will the performance be like to a 980 with the AMD GPU running mantle? O_o

AMD's upcoming card will probably beat the 980 without Mantle if the rumours of 20nm and new architecture are true.

Then Nvidia will drop prices and release the 980ti fully unlocked Maxwell...

AMD will respond

The cycle continues...

[deathjester]

@deathjester can you give me a link on how to do the downsampling hack for Mass Effect 1?

 

Gedosato.

http://blog.metaclassofnil.com/?tag=gedosato

 

Put resolution of native monitor in blank fields in settings. Scroll to bottom and set first two settings to true under Mouse subheading. I also prefer bicubic under settings. You only have to do this once. Hit save. You don't really need AA past 4k. All depends on your GPU power. At 4 k 2xAA might be nice. Past 4k it's usless. It will just blur stuff. For screenshots edit the keybindings and remove the # from the first one (full screenshot) and save. That hotkey is now active (/ button on numpad). 

 

Run the me config in binaries folder, pick new resolution.

 

For high textures. Use this pack.

 

http://www.moddb.com/mods/mass-effect-1-new-texture-updatesimprovements-mod

 

Use this large memory address program on the masseffect.exe (only need to do this once for each game). 

 

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/attachment.php?s=c8cee3b4b64c5e6db630775da1b15062&attachmentid=34392&d=1269231650

 

bioengine.Ini settings/changes are here. Use F3 to find the settings with search to make it easy. You can change the ini of the first game in notepad.

 

http://forum.bioware.com/topic/241434-mass-effect-1-updatedimproved-textures-mod/

 

For ME 2 you are going to be using texmod. Bioware has an official thread. Same with masseffect2.exe. Use large memory address on it.  You can also do some things with the ini but it is harder. You use a coalesced editor. Threads on bioware about it. 

 

Tex Mod is here (download the bottom one) and some of the 4k or lower textures (again it depends on the gpu) are in the bioware link. Others can be found in Bioware projects section. You choose masseffect2.exe them with texmod and then click run. The more you have longer the load time. I prob load like 40 on ME2 and it takes about 4-5 mins on my I7. 

https://code.google.com/p/texmod/downloads/list

 

http://forum.bioware.com/topic/151839-higher-resolution-textures-for-characters-pc-mod/

 

Me3 here. Again remember to use large memory address on each exe, or you will have memory crashes. You may also have to run Gedosato full screen and not Windows Borderless (I do).

http://forum.bioware.com/topic/272815-me3-mod-highres-textures-next-gen-illumination-3d-fix/

 

Here is ME 2 (replaying it atm) on my R9 290 with 4k tex packs at 5.2 k or whatever the hell it is past 4k in Gedosato. Compression isn't too bad on flickr (was on imgur). This is close to what you will see on screen. 3 looks better. 2 looks better than 1, but 1 is a 2007 game. It can still look good though.

[Castdeath97]

 

So getting a low end processor with a much higher end gpu is legit now with mantle?

[deathjester]

So getting a low end processor with a much higher end gpu is legit now with mantle?

 

Not yet, until we have total adoption, whether that is DX 12 or the new OpenGL, but Mantle easily ports to DX 12 which makes it very attractive for devs.

 

I would say more like Mantle and a low level API always expected their big gains in a RTS/MMO type title. Those are titles that are actually cpu bound. 

 

Guild Wars 2 can come to a halt on my 4770k at 4.5ghz. These are the kind of games Mantle is just going to see HUGE gains in. Platformers? Not so much. 

 

If there are any titles that NEED a low level API they are MMO's and RTS games. This is why when the fanboys were saying "Mantle sucks", people in the know just laughed. Those of us with high clocked Intel's knew what this was for and where we would see huge gains. There isn't a CPU that exists that can handle massive amounts of people on screen in some games with our current API. A low level API was needed for all cpu's and not just budget ones.