AMDs Mantle

By spaceelf
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chrisj1968

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If NVIDIA picks this up, which I'm hoping they will, this might become a serious competitor for Direct3D. Mantle on PC + SteamOS and a similar API on PS4, would make it the best API to optimize for in AAA titles. 

 

good point, I just thought about that as I read your post. MS Direct3D could be the least used product. if AMD and Nvidia could work on a standard that conjoins eachs technology to work without giving up trade secrets itself, should be able to develop games for both companies and stop this division. just a note: if this mantle works, it looks like it will be a heck-uva-lot more efficient and gets rid of all the API stuff from before(in the generalized resoruces frame frame) 7 items down to mantles 2(images and memory)

 

Wow, I hope this works.

 

Q: does this mean game designers will no longer be trapped in vertices limit hell and the flood gates open? erm or polygon limits as well? I could see some hidef worlds created.

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spaceelf

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NVAPI is not a graphics API, it's a bunch of utility functions about the state of the graphics card.

I know as far as what the dev page said.  I don't know the extent of it, though, and if it becomes unnecessary that's less work for devs.

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Andre S. Veteran

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I know as far as what the dev page said.  I don't know the extent of it, though, and if it becomes unnecessary that's less work for devs.

NVAPI is not necessary in general for game developers. It's probably used by NVIDIA's own driver control panel and it's used by utilities like GPU-Z, OpenHardwareMonitor, MSI Afterburner etc. It's for video card management, not rendering.

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spaceelf

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NVAPI is not necessary in general for game developers. It's probably used by NVIDIA's own driver control panel and it's used by utilities like GPU-Z, OpenHardwareMonitor, MSI Afterburner etc. It's for video card management, not rendering.

All I know at this point is it's used for Battlefield 3 and 4.  I'd have to dig deeper though and I'm admittedly not that interested.

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Andre S. Veteran

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All I know at this point is it's used for Battlefield 3 and 4.  I'd have to dig deeper though and I'm admittedly not that interested.

That's interesting, not sure what they're achieving with that. Perhaps tweak driver settings at run-time, or enabling different frame rendering methods in SLI setups? In any case NVAPI is nothing like Mantle.

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spaceelf

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http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-11-01-escaping-the-shooter-mold-how-oxide-plans-to-revive-the-rts

Oxide Games is coming out today as a supporter of AMD's low-level Mantle API, which will allow developers to maximize performance on graphics chipsets that support it. Baker said that supporting Mantle was a "straightforward" adaptation that only took a couple of months on an alpha API.

 

"You'll see people misrepresenting that AMD's pushing this technology, but the reality is that a lot of people - including myself and other graphics architects - have been asking for this type of thing for a long time," said Baker. "I call it a contract of trust. The problem is driver models and APIs are built to protect against any random scenario which might happen. That costs you a lot of performance. Our game engine is already carefully engineered not to do certain bad things. From our perspective, when AMD came around and said, 'we're actually going to do this,' we were very interested to try it."

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ViperAFK

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Its kind of annoying how AMD keeps flip-flopping when it comes to what hardware mantle actually supports. At first they said it was for GCN, and then they say its not limited to GCN.

 

I just want to know if my 6950 will be supported

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Andre S. Veteran

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Its kind of annoying how AMD keeps flip-flopping when it comes to what hardware mantle actually supports. At first they said it was for GCN, and then they say its not limited to GCN.

 

I just want to know if my 6950 will be supported

My perception is that the API could be implemented for different GPUs, but AMD's implementation will be limited to GCN. The HD 6950 is not GCN so it won't be supported.

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ViperAFK

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My perception is that the API could be implemented for different GPUs, but AMD's implementation will be limited to GCN. The HD 6950 is not GCN so it won't be supported.

Then as far as I'm concerned, AMD's showboating about how mantle can be supported on anything rings very hollow, when they won't even support their own hardware properly. This is still a perfectly good and pretty powerful card, I'm quite disappointed if it won't be supported.

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Andre S. Veteran

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Then as far as I'm concerned, AMD's showboating about how mantle can be supported on anything rings very hollow, when they won't even support their own hardware properly. This is still a perfectly good and pretty powerful card, I'm quite disappointed if it won't be supported.

I guess it's more of a long-term investment on what forms the basis of next-gen consoles and their whole APU strategy. By the time Mantle gets any kind of significant adoption, the HD 6950 will be 4 years old; I'm not sure how it's in AMD's interest to pour money into new features for GPUs that are already a few generations behind, and I don't expect NVIDIA to do anything similar. It's not like they were selling anymore of these. That doesn't mean it wouldn't make sense for NVIDIA to support it in their actual and next-gen GPUs, with big names in the gaming industry like Johan Andersson asking for it and taking advantage of it on AMD's cards and APUs.

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Yusuf M. Veteran

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I guess it's more of a long-term investment on what forms the basis of next-gen consoles and their whole APU strategy. By the time Mantle gets any kind of significant adoption, the HD 6950 will be 4 years old; I'm not sure how it's in AMD's interest to pour money into new features for GPUs that are already a few generations behind, and I don't expect NVIDIA to do anything similar. It's not like they were selling anymore of these. That doesn't mean it wouldn't make sense for NVIDIA to support it in their actual and next-gen GPUs, with big names in the gaming industry like Johan Andersson asking for it and taking advantage of it on AMD's cards and APUs.

Yeah, the fact that Johan Andersson is excited for it means a lot. He's very knowledgeable about this kind of thing and I don't think he's an AMD fanboy.

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psionicinversion

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Its kind of annoying how AMD keeps flip-flopping when it comes to what hardware mantle actually supports. At first they said it was for GCN, and then they say its not limited to GCN.

 

I just want to know if my 6950 will be supported

 

Its not limited to GCN but one of the reasons for like directx's "slowness" is its support for legacy hardware, theyve seemed to build Mantle on the GCN architecture cus the bloke said one of the parts of GCN has support for advanced MSAA features so seeing as this architecture is going forward its stupid to back peddle with an API, but it has enough abstraction to use say nvidias architecture. Also at the end of the video it said how devs can join there beta program... so if mantle is only in a beta state really its better to have it run on 1 architecture and find out where things going wrong, need to be improved, things added etc so by the time it becomes "gold" most people should have a GCN card seeing as there hitting all the price points with competitive hardware its easier to pick one up

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incendy

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It is too bad Microsoft isn't supporting this as well as DirectX in Xbox One and Windows Store. Would be a decent cross platform solution. Although I can also see why they would be worried about future issues that arise when it is updated and they have no control.

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Max Norris

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As long as this is not a threat to DX I am fine with it existing.

If I'm reading it right (somebody correct me otherwise) it won't matter, it's just a different API that can be used.. the developer picks their API, be in Mantle, DirectX or OpenGL, sometimes a combination if they want to give the option, some games/programs do. (IE, me installing a program that uses OpenGL won't affect anything that uses DirectX.) Sounds like a win for everybody personally, well as long as your card is supported of course.. it being adopted by all manufacturers is another story though, have to see how that turns out, hope it doesn't turn into another API war like you see on the Linux side occasionally. Kind of glad I picked AMD this time around upgrade wise though.

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vcfan

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mantle isn't magic. NVidia will just roll their own. the way I see it playing out is, either Microsoft creates a low level api in directx,which interfaces with drivers, or a low level api which hooks into mantle and nvidias version.

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