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

[Opcode]

Pretty much expected here, when it comes to drawing all of the units in the game you end up with an API bottleneck from DirectX. With direct access to the GPU with Mantle you can send higher batch counts. It should be interesting to see DirectX 12 launch as they are adopting a lot of Mantle's technologies.

[PerfectTemplar]

This isn't news, stop posting this shit.

[xAcid9]

[Valentyn]

Ok. So far my biggest complain about Mantle has been that AMD on one day is pretty aggressive with marketing Mantle as being open, but the next day they won't give Intel access to it.

 

I completely understand, it's mostly because Mantel designed to use the GCN architecture. Since they've handed it over to Khronos, it's pretty guaranteed that it'll run on anything, and everything under the sun through OpenGL so we have that going for us at least.

Now let's just hope OpenGL 4.5 actually doesn't get bogged down and  still holds all that ancient 2.1 legacy code. There are so many people working together that it's hard to get anything done, as some refuse to want to move on from the well over decade old code.

[OlekKing]

 

Now lets not start this war. But who cares about PhysX either. I personally find Mantle more useful than PhysX; 

 

Anyway it's good to see some more adoption of the Mantle architecture. I just wish AMD and nvidia would stop being little girls about it and just make their Mantle/PhysX thing cross platform.

I don't think the question is about how useful PhysX is, it's simply an easy way for developers to implement really impressive effects which would be absent from the game otherwise, it can also enhance the gameplay. It's simply a really nice thing to have which further pushes PC hardware and makes games more immersive.

 

Mantle is a big deal for low-medium end hardware.

[spartaman64]

.

[Humbug]

I completely understand, it's mostly because Mantel designed to use the GCN architecture. Since they've handed it over to Khronos, it's pretty guaranteed that it'll run on anything, and everything under the sun through OpenGL so we have that going for us at least.

OpenGL will not integrate Mantle. It's just that the Khronos group can use Mantle as a case study and if necessary take some learnings / engineering principles from it since the design goals are similar.

 

Now let's just hope OpenGL 4.5 actually doesn't get bogged down and  still holds all that ancient 2.1 legacy code. There are so many people working together that it's hard to get anything done, as some refuse to want to move on from the well over decade old code.

OpenGL 4.5 is an incremental update.

The ground-up redesign of the API is OpenGL Next which apparently will drop all the legacy stuff. I share your concerns about them being unable to get anything useful done fast. But at least this time they have acknowledged that problem and they even gave the below bullet point.

This new initiative is "NOT" going to be a "multi-year, design-by-committee process."

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTc2ODQ

 

[Altecice]

This is great for AMD users as well as the industry as a whole. I dont know why the Nvidia people complain, Mantle is of more use than Physx imo (yes i know you can't compare them)... But if anything its made Microsoft hurry up with DX12 (an industry monster that we all are forced to use). Stop picking sides in an argument that's just not there.

[Asterra]

Well, my two cents.

 

Mantle supposedly solves the one big reason why I personally have steadfastly refused to go multi-GPU, and that is the microstuttering caused by differences in frame arrival time, which isn't adequately solved by either Nvidia's or AMD's frame pacing solutions.  I say "supposedly" because, quite inexplicably, none of the reviews focusing on Mantle's use in Beyond Earth have provided closeups of frame-by-frame latency.  But it is a near certainty that the issue is fully resolved because frames are literally being split-rendered.  So either the halves are arriving in perfect sync or there's a gargantuan tear right down the middle and nobody's noticed it yet (unlikely).  Simultaneous with this, the reduced latency from a Mantle implementation is a pretty convenient counter to the extra latency that is unavoidably added by any multi-GPU config.

 

This basically means that, going forward, should any Mantle-supporting game arrive which I have interest in playing, I will finally have an excuse to use more than one GPU.  I am tempted to say Dragon Age Inquisition... but since I loathe EA and Origin, I plan to wait until I can get the whole game plus its DLC for sub-$20 (and probably some mods to correct the universal ugliness of its characters), so the title is essentially irrelevant to me (unless I get it as a freebie over the holidays, I guess).

 

DX12, coming in about a year, should have about the same amount of reduced latency.  But if it does not also enable split-frame rendering, it's dead to me.  And the takeaway of all this is that in those cases (Beyond Earth, DAI, Tomb Raider or whatever) where Mantle may be an option and it is implemented smartly, DirectX is utterly indefensible, regardless of maker.

 

I'd pay a cool hundred bucks if somebody would enable Mantle in Skyrim or New Vegas.  Sigh.