Thursday, January 30th 2014
AMD Mantle Driver to Only Benefit Four GPUs Initially
Crushed your F5 key on AMD driver download page yet? Unless you have four very specific AMD Radeon GPUs, you can stop it right now. According to DICE, developers of the first game to take advantage of Mantle, the 3D graphics API AMD is introducing with its Catalyst 14.1 beta driver, will give tangible benefits to only four specific GPUs - Radeon R9 290X, R9 290 (non-X), R7 260X, and A-Series "Kaveri" APU-integrated R7 200 series.
Owners of all other Radeon GPUs, including those based on the Graphics CoreNext (GCN) architecture, such as the recently launched R9 280X and R9 270X, are out of luck, for now. AMD is still ironing out issues with Mantle on those other GCN GPUs. Interestingly, in the same press note, DICE posted performance numbers yielded on an HD 7970, which look promising. AMD is expected to release its Catalyst 14.1 beta driver a little later this week, as it's jousting with some last-minute bug-finds.
Source:
DICE
Owners of all other Radeon GPUs, including those based on the Graphics CoreNext (GCN) architecture, such as the recently launched R9 280X and R9 270X, are out of luck, for now. AMD is still ironing out issues with Mantle on those other GCN GPUs. Interestingly, in the same press note, DICE posted performance numbers yielded on an HD 7970, which look promising. AMD is expected to release its Catalyst 14.1 beta driver a little later this week, as it's jousting with some last-minute bug-finds.
133 Comments on AMD Mantle Driver to Only Benefit Four GPUs Initially
Again, you can't muster up arguments worth 2 cents and instead get cocky and ultra-defensive, that's just weak. At first I got a little frustrated, single-minded people usually frustrate me, but now I'm actually entertained.
Anyway, people of the thread, we haven't been complaining about something for what? 2-3 posts now? Let's get back on track! What the Hell is up with AMD's red logo, shouldn't it be green like in the old days!? Me as a nVidia hater, can't hate nVidia properly because they the only one using green now!
/endinsanelystupidargumentsagainstbrandxory
The point is that the lifespan of Mantle will probably not go beyond DX11.x because of the reasons you listed above. As soon as MS shorts out the alleged inefficiencies in the DX11 API/drivers then we will get better performance. We all remember the comparison of DX9 vs. DX10 and how much faster DX9 was
I don't think you understand the point of Mantle. It was never about making money. It is mostly meant to boost performance to lower end systems. Basically, it makes more games playable for everyone. This open up potential customers for developers to sell more games to. Almost all PC systems are shipped with integrated graphics now. The APU is becoming mainstream if it hasn't already. This is good news for developers and gamers on a budget.
The other part of Mantle is to push developers and MS to optimize their software. If one day, DX12 or whatever version become close to metal just like Mantle and displace Mantle, then it had done its job. Think about why AMD left Mantle open so that Intel and NVDA and implement it on their GPU. They're not trying to corner the market like NVDA did with PhysX and CUDA. They are also not charging a premium for it so it is nothing more than a resource drain. The only benefit AMD gets is it "might" open up more sales for APU. However, it does not discriminate Intel CPUs so that's why it's just a maybe. The only people benefiting from this are consumers and developers. Developers trade a little more development time for more sales.
I hope Mantle gave the industry a good kick so they force Mantle to disappear. That would be the day. For now, Mantle is a great thing regardless of what brand you prefer because it just sparked up competition and more innovation in the future. I also don't mind free performance even if it's just 1%.
WizzardMantle will undoubtedly increase sales for games because minimum and recommended specs will lower. As far as integrated graphics go, there's only Intel and AMD left. Intel's GPUs are still mostly useless for games except for Iris on some games. AMD is the only one in town with a worthwhile on-die iGPU. So in a business perspective, it would make sense to optimize for GCN through Mantle as it is the the most popular low end GPU that can run games. It is also the only architecture for all 3 consoles which games are made for. Mantle also open up game sales for people with older systems because they only need to upgrade their GPU.
Nobody is willing to pay $100 for games. In fact, developers know that $60 is the limit and have not raised that for 3 generations. A lot of them are charging lower MSRP now. They realized it is better for them to take a $10-20 hit per game and sell 2X the volume. This was proven by Steam. Since R&D make up most of the expenses for a game, it makes sense that selling more will decrease the marginal cost per unit. In the end, they will actually make more money selling it cheaper. Selling games cheaper like Steam will also decrease the volume of software piracy.
For example, anyone notice the new Metal Gear Solid for all systems will only MSRP for $40? I'm sure we'll see a lot more like that since devs will get their other $20 through DLC. After gaming become mainstream for China, I am sure games will get cheaper. By staying the same price, it is essentially cheaper because of inflation.
Historically, the cost of R&D have risen higher than the growth of gamers population. With China being in the mix legally, this will dramatically change the R&D expense to sales ratio. Hopefully this will mean we get complete games instead of $60 games + $50 DLC.
This is why I was bitching about. If it would have been open, you could have use Mantle on nVidia or even Intel chips. But as those guys flamed me, is not only about the drivers, right? ;)
They need also hardware support. ;)
If anything I'd like Mantle to succed just for the bitchslap factor to Micro$oft.
Well, it helps if you don't have a blind green eye...
Should NVDA write CUDA or PhysX drivers for AMD?
Mantle can work with Radens 5 and 6k series. They're not going to write drivers for it though because less than 1% wold benefit from it and it would take more work than GCN.
I know you're not that dumb to think that different hardware don't need different drivers. You're clearly pulling people's strings here or your definition of "open" is different than everyone else's.
Think of two people from different nationalities that don't speak each others language: what CGN does is a "real time" interpreter so the two dudes can yap all they want and understand each other, even though they speak different languages.
Both other AMD non-CGN cards as well as NVDA can do it too BUT, since they don't have the interpreter (CGN hardware), they'll need a software version of it for it to work which will obviously have a performance hit. This is what will give AMD an edge over NVDA.
Obviously, AMD won't make non-CGN cards use Mantle UNTIL the CGN cards can all use it and then they can make their own software interpreter for the non-CGN cards, but it won't be as good as the hardware CGN one.
AMD isn't in any way restricting Mantle and NVDA can make their own software interpreter but, like non-CGN AMD cards, it will have the same problem: it's software instead of hardware.
Furthermore, in much the same way that most new apps are still single-threaded despite multi-core CPUs being around for a decade, most graphics engines don't take advantage of the parallelism inherent in modern GPUs and DX11. Mantle can utilise this parallelism, but at the cost of (re)writing your entire graphics engine; I'd daresay that with enough time and effort a lot more performance could be pulled out of DX11 (remember that most, if not all "DirectX 11" engines are DX9 or DX10 engines with DX11 features like tessellation bolted on). In fact, AFAIK the only graphics engine that is pure DX11 from the ground up is the one used by Futuremark for 3DMark, and that's not used by any games so it's not really useful as a comparison point.
At the end of the day, Mantle is an evolutionary dead end in terms of graphics. Instead of throwing money at gimmicks like Mantle, AMD should be investing in its driver team.
Anyone for tea and scones down at the village green?
I did tell them there was no need to pull out their red and green beat sticks, but they never listen. Reminds me of the school I used to work at, with those kids from that demographic.
There were also issues with DX10 and developers having to learn the api. Microsoft doesn't dick around they don't keep legacy code around for ages like opengl, they scraped everything and start over so developers used to working with DX9 suddenly found themselves lost in a new api with different ways of doing things well. DX11 is pretty much DX10 with a bunch of extra features tacked on, it's a ton closer to dx10 than it in to dx9. Why is it received better? Because developers had time to learn it and bitch about dx10 it's essentially the same re branding microsoft did with vista -> 7. Give it a service pack update call it a new name and people will praise you.
I also don't understand your point of a cost of development for rewriting the game engine in a new API equates to nvidia giving developers a SDK with features that are 95% done all you have to do is read a few documents and lazy copy pasta it into your game to get the features. You're comparing something that would cost a company 100k to something that would cost a company maybe 10k, plus all the support that games with including mantel. It's a recurring cost when you split your game engine into two parts, everytime you change something in one it has to be carried over to the other. Else you're porting games like valve who just gets 95% there and says' fuck it people wont notice a few missing lighting features or w.e
To be honest you don't see this type of bs everyday. =)))
Your quick to point out when someone else is wrong, but when you're wrong you ignore it and deflect attention elsewhere.
By the way, this article is totally mislead as DICE confirmed that their driver works on every GCN cards. I don't know why TPU had not edited or taken it down. I smelled some bias here :(
About Mantle not being on VLIW5 and VLIW4, I'll hazard a guess and say that the improvemente would be minimal if anything. I suppose that Mantle exposes the complete compute core (like a mini HSA or something) and VLIW5/4 performance in compute was very poor (a 7770 matches a 6970 in that regard for example). Of course, without internal knoledge of how the driver works everything is speculation BUT GCN was build for compute from the ground up. The fact that AMD choose to only support Mantle on GCN could be a hint of how it works.
Given how stubborn AMD is sometimes, I wouldn't write off the possibility of them writing a VLIW driver just as a proof of concept but I wouldn't expect a commercially available driver (for all we know, they could have). Heck, if IP wasn't a concern I could see them developing a Kepler driver for the same reason.