AMD's "Mantle" Promises Next Big Step in PC Performance

[beez]

For the record: AMD said they are opening up the Mantle API, so that anyone can access the source. They also said that they are open to support any hardware that offers the features required to use Mantle. It is not the tech from the XBONE or the PS4, it is something similar, but their goal is to allow access to low-level GPU programming on any hardware that has the minimum requirements -> DirectX doesn't do this and won't do this, at least in the near future. nVidia is open to support it, just as it was invited to implement any other tech AMD released, such as their own physics solution. But nVidia is anti-competitive, the code they released to run on CPUs is intentionally crippled so it will be slow as hell, for example. Among the professionals, nVidia pushed CUDA for years, they didn't care to implement OpenCL properly (as an example bitcoin mining on an nVidia card is 10 times slower than on a CPU), now that industry is moving to OpenCL and they pretty much have to play the catch-up game. Hope it will be the same with games too.

 

[iniudan]

As an ATI fanboy let me just say I applaud their work in this much needed field to break old brute force conventions through 20 layers of overhead bullshit, but this might be real bad for PC gaming...
A propriary API hinging on a single hardware manufacurer means this shit will not work properly on any other hardware or possibly exclude other hardware all together, worse yet could start cutting backwards compatibility forcing you to buy their specific new products for each itteration (much like MS is trying to get going now).
Not to mention Nvidia has absolutely no intention of supporting ATI plans, they also have 10x bigger budgets for everything and this could very well spawn yet another propriary API that will make this twice as horrible.

ATI's work could have just as well gone into OpenGL extensions, which is an established open freely available API that granted has backwards conventions but it is for anyone to use, a proprietary API however is just the opposite.
Also while ATI's software guys were working on new toys their users had do contend with poor drivers and even worse OpenGL support... how about putting some time into that.

Mantle is open (but no mention of what the license is yet), not proprietary, so it is not a remake of the 90s with thing like 3Dfx Glide and the API communicate with the kernel-mode device driver, so there is still one layer of abstraction for other manufacturer to adapt their product to be compatible.

 

[alj]

I'll pass. Recently AMD has acquired a habit of promising the world and delivering underwhelming products. The Bulldozer CPU's were supposed to wipe the floor with Intel, but the first generation couldn't even match the performance of the previous generation of AMD CPU's.

Exactly, what we need is games to be built on opengl as that is an open standard you can easily move your game anywhere you want windows OSX *nix, phones tablets consoles you name it. Then as a game dev you are not reliant on one platform to survive its good practice.

Mantle may be "open" and if it truly is open and can be easily ported to any platform then that's ok but it seams to me we already have a perfectly good solution in place.

 

[beez]

Exactly, what we need is games to be built on opengl as that is an open standard you can easily move your game anywhere you want windows OSX *nix, phones tablets consoles you name it. Then as a game dev you are not reliant on one platform to survive its good practice.

Mantle may be "open" and if it truly is open and can be easily ported to any platform then that's ok but it seams to me we already have a perfectly good solution in place.

OpenGL is pretty crap, performance and otherwise compared even to DirectX, Don't get me wrong, I would pretty much prefer it if it was better, but unfortunately, it's not. What Mantle would enable devs to do, is basically to do the hacks you've seen on consoles, that use every last drop of performance available, to make things smoother and more pretty.

For example, companies like Naughty Dog, used assembly (machine code) to milk every last drop of power from the PS3, this would enable similar things to be done on the PC. The biggest bottleneck of doing this on a PC was the hardware variety. To code for the PS3, you write low level code for one piece of hardware, this enables you to go and use code specific to that HW, whereas, on PC it is obvious, why you couldn't do it before. Imagine the possibilities of hardware much, much faster than last gen's, with steroids. For stuff like that, even DX is inferior, let alone OpenGL. As far as support is concerned, AMD is much more open with their tech, than any other competing company. For example, nVidia is just now beginning to somewhat extend support for its own Optimus tech on Linux and it's pretty much unusable.

 

[tangoprime]

I'll pass. Recently AMD has acquired a habit of promising the world and delivering underwhelming products. The Bulldozer CPU's were supposed to wipe the floor with Intel, but the first generation couldn't even match the performance of the previous generation of AMD CPU's.

I'll add my support to this sentiment with one word. Catalyst. I've been all nvidia for years ever since "upgrading" my gpu for the original Knights of the Old Republic, requiring me to use the first iteration of the catalyst drivers, and seeing immediately that the graphics performance was actually worse than in my previous generation gpu. I managed to find some non catalyst drivers that worked (posted on a board full of people equally pissed about this) and while it performed better, it still wasn't an improvement over the gpu I'd just replaced. Not too long after that, I switched to an nvidia (can't remember exactly, but I think this was during their 6-series) and was blown away. Since then, it's been 7800gt, 8600gtx, 9800gx2, and currently a pair of 560ti's.

 

[Andrew_C]

I'll add my support to this sentiment with one word. Catalyst. I've been all nvidia for years ever since "upgrading" my gpu for the original Knights of the Old Republic, requiring me to use the first iteration of the catalyst drivers, and seeing immediately that the graphics performance was actually worse than in my previous generation gpu. I managed to find some non catalyst drivers that worked (posted on a board full of people equally pissed about this) and while it performed better, it still wasn't an improvement over the gpu I'd just replaced. Not too long after that, I switched to an nvidia (can't remember exactly, but I think this was during their 6-series) and was blown away. Since then, it's been 7800gt, 8600gtx, 9800gx2, and currently a pair of 560ti's.

I know what you mean, ATI/AMD drivers have always been dodgy. I remember the time the ATI Catalyst drivers accidentally disabled 3D acceleration on AGP cards (when AGP was still the standard). And the only reason why the release documentation to the developers of the open source Linux/BSD drivers is that they couldn't be bothered to write decent Linux drivers.

I'm using an old ATI Radeon HD 5770 at the moment, before that an NVidia 9600 GTX2. I have no loyalty to either brand

EDIT: and as everyone says,they should rather upgrade their drivers to support OpenGL 4.4 and put some work into the the next versions of OpenGL, rather than splitting the market with yet another API.

 

[Matthi205]

I'll add my support to this sentiment with one word. Catalyst. I've been all nvidia for years ever since "upgrading" my gpu for the original Knights of the Old Republic, requiring me to use the first iteration of the catalyst drivers, and seeing immediately that the graphics performance was actually worse than in my previous generation gpu. I managed to find some non catalyst drivers that worked (posted on a board full of people equally pissed about this) and while it performed better, it still wasn't an improvement over the gpu I'd just replaced. Not too long after that, I switched to an nvidia (can't remember exactly, but I think this was during their 6-series) and was blown away. Since then, it's been 7800gt, 8600gtx, 9800gx2, and currently a pair of 560ti's.

I know what you mean, ATI/AMD drivers have always been dodgy. I remember the time the ATI Catalyst drivers accidentally disabled 3D acceleration on AGP cards (when AGP was still the standard). And the only reason why the release documentation to the developers of the open source Linux/BSD drivers is that they couldn't be bothered to write decent Linux drivers.

I'm using an old ATI Radeon HD 5770 at the moment, before that an NVidia 9600 GTX2. I have no loyalty to either brand

EDIT: and as everyone says,they should rather upgrade their drivers to support OpenGL 4.4 and put some work into the the next versions of OpenGL, rather than splitting the market with yet another API.

THEY ARE NOT SPLITTING THE MARKET. Mantle is open source. NVidia can implement it should they want to. But they'd rather stick their own proprietary tech down everyone's throat until those people switch to an open standard (CUDA? OpenCL!).

Catalyst drivers are pretty bad, that's true. And the newer the driver version is, the worse they get for legacy hardware - we're coming to a point where the only drivers legacy hardware runs with properly are from 2011. This is even partly valid for the HD66XX series. I own two HD6670s, and they both only work properly when I use the driver from 2011. With any newer driver, D3D performance goes down the drain and OpenGL applications directly crash the driver. I have no problems like this with the open source AMD cards driver for Linux.

 

[Andrew_C]

[
THEY ARE NOT SPLITTING THE MARKET. Mantle is open source. NVidia can implement it should they want to. But they'd rather stick their own proprietary tech down everyone's throat until those people switch to an open standard (CUDA? OpenCL!).

They are splitting the market. There are 2 perfectly good graphics API's, we don't need a third. And open means nothing when one company controls the standard. After all, CUDA (which you obviously detest) is technically an open standard, but because NVidia controls it and would not relinquish control, OpenCL was devised and now everyone uses it, even NVidia kind of supports it.

 

[Strazdas]

I hope this fails, we dont need no mantles that split the market and split the PC market in half. why cant people just use OpenGL anymore, that one worked, and while not as powerful as current DirectX, its so only becuase pretty much noone supports it anymore.

I'll pass. Recently AMD has acquired a habit of promising the world and delivering underwhelming products. The Bulldozer CPU's were supposed to wipe the floor with Intel, but the first generation couldn't even match the performance of the previous generation of AMD CPU's.

I'll add my support to this sentiment with one word. Catalyst. I've been all nvidia for years ever since "upgrading" my gpu for the original Knights of the Old Republic, requiring me to use the first iteration of the catalyst drivers, and seeing immediately that the graphics performance was actually worse than in my previous generation gpu. I managed to find some non catalyst drivers that worked (posted on a board full of people equally pissed about this) and while it performed better, it still wasn't an improvement over the gpu I'd just replaced. Not too long after that, I switched to an nvidia (can't remember exactly, but I think this was during their 6-series) and was blown away. Since then, it's been 7800gt, 8600gtx, 9800gx2, and currently a pair of 560ti's.

Yeah, i as well was extremely dissapointed by ATI (Then Radeon) drivers and how badly they performed in pretty much everything and have been a happy camepr on Nvidias side. Nvidia card is prerequisite of me buying a computer now.
Another thing to note is that Nvidia actually works with game developers on optimization for, yes you guessed it, nvidia cards. thats why even if rap performance is not that great of a leap they actually often perform better in games. now granted not all game developers recieve this support, but they are actively trying to make it better.
Wheas AMD... continues to dissapoint.