AMD Mantle allows adding Vram on multi-gpu configs.

[Ja.KooLit]

Just wanna share this one.

Now if they will be successful on this, alot of AMD users with multi-gpu will be very happy.

source: http://www.overclock.net/t/1539218/...antle-allows-adding-vram-on-multi-gpu-configs

 

[eidairaman1]

Just wanna share this one.

Now if they will be successful on this, alot of AMD users with multi-gpu will be very happy.

source: http://www.overclock.net/t/1539218/...antle-allows-adding-vram-on-multi-gpu-configs

so the whole pool of ram will be used, so if you have 2 3GB cards You will be able to Use 6GB total?

 

[xfia]

 

[Toothless]

This may have just turned me to wanting 280x's now.

 

[GhostRyder]

Oh really, now that is an interesting perk to mantle for people to see... Might be a cool idea if it works well as that could alleviate many potential bottlenecks down the chain on cards however being limited to mantle is a bit sad because its not exactly something every game has.

Hopefully we get to here more on this soon!

 

[eidairaman1]

Oh really, now that is an interesting perk to mantle for people to see... Might be a cool idea if it works well as that could alleviate many potential bottlenecks down the chain on cards however being limited to mantle is a bit sad because its not exactly something every game has.

Hopefully we get to here more on this soon!

They need to appeal to game devs to use the Mantle API.

 

[Ja.KooLit]

so the whole pool of ram will be used, so if you have 2 3GB cards You will be able to Use 6GB total?

Thats the whole idea....... I think

 

[eidairaman1]

Thats the whole idea....... I think

about time, be able to use both GPUs full capability.

 

[natr0n]

A game would have to be custom tailored to take advantage of all the ram.

 

[Ja.KooLit]

But I think its abit tricky to current cards. The up coming HBM stacking vram cards (R9 3xx) series might get this. They must have got this idea from the "stacking vram"

 

[MxPhenom 216]

They need to appeal to game devs to use the Mantle API.

Going to be hard to do that with how much more market share their competitors have over them. Developers are much more inclined to support the masses rather then minority with their games. And now that Nvidia has the whole Gameworks thing, Nvidia just has to toss them the Gameworks libraries, and wads of cash, and chances of Mantle to be supported for that particular games kind of goes down the drain.

 

[Brusfantomet]

This will not work for AFR (alternate frame rendering) mode, witch is the one used most of the time for both CF and SLI. The reason is that there is no buss fast Geno for one GPU to access the other GPUs memory. AFR beeing the lazy way of doing multiple cards i will be glad when its gone.

For tile based and other methods where the cards collaborate one one frame it could work, as the same textures not necessarily need to be in both cards.

Either way it requires the engine devs to code some rather complex algorithms for it to work good.

Its probably going to allow to 3GB cards to act as a 4 or 5 GB card, ass some parts of the ram must have the same data, but it is a improvement non the less

 

[RCoon]

So BF4, Thief and Lichdom: Battlemage will double your VRAM.
Until they hand developers bags of cash and swag, none of them will choose mantle over standard API's.

 

[EarthDog]

They need to appeal to game devs to use the Mantle API.

BF4 is 'using' it (Mantle). Not well... which doesn't, to me, bode well to it future. If they can't get it right on a AAA title like that...


+1 on the AFR comment above...

 

[Tallencor]

Link down?
Edit: nope. lol.

 

[The Von Matrices]

This will not work for AFR (alternate frame rendering) mode, witch is the one used most of the time for both CF and SLI. The reason is that there is no buss fast Geno for one GPU to access the other GPUs memory. AFR beeing the lazy way of doing multiple cards i will be glad when its gone.

For tile based and other methods where the cards collaborate one one frame it could work, as the same textures not necessarily need to be in both cards.

Either way it requires the engine devs to code some rather complex algorithms for it to work good.

Its probably going to allow to 3GB cards to act as a 4 or 5 GB card, ass some parts of the ram must have the same data, but it is a improvement non the less

You basically summarized exactly what I was going to say. This doesn't work with alternate-frame rendering, so the only Mantle game that it could potentially work for at the moment is Civilization: Beyond Earth, which uses split-frame rendering. And as you said, the memory available is far from doubled and will heavily depend what you can see in the scene.

I have trouble believing that this is even practical to implement because this technique is essentially aggressively cleaning the VRAM of objects not on screen at the current time. However, every time a player changes the viewpoint a small amount, the GPUs would have to reload most of the geometry and textures from disk or CPU RAM. There is so much computational power needed to decide and transfer the geometry and textures that the bottleneck will rapidly shift to some other component of the system. It's a lot easier to add more memory to a GPU, in comparison.

 

[Steevo]

Unified Memory Architecture, or Heterogeneous. instead of using the system RAM as cache which is slow the PCIe allows the driver and the core to see and use the memory of both cards as it sees fit to load up huge textures, and with the ability to sample parts of a texture instead of the whole thing it will save bandwidth.


Considering that we are really only using a quarter of the PCIe bandwidth and the textures would have to come across from the much much slower system RAM anyway why not allow the system to fetch and skin out of faster GDDR on the other card.

 

[AsRock]

Oh really, now that is an interesting perk to mantle for people to see... Might be a cool idea if it works well as that could alleviate many potential bottlenecks down the chain on cards however being limited to mantle is a bit sad because its not exactly something every game has.

Hopefully we get to here more on this soon!

DX13 hahahha.

 

[Ferrum Master]

Did anyone say - at last?

 

[xfia]

not sure it would really be all that complex.. at least for developers anyway. one of the purposes of mantle is to make it so developers dont have to focus so much on system resources.

 

[fullinfusion]

Oh my oh my oh my.... Now amds thinking! Let's hope it takes off

 

[Arjai]

Sounds rather interesting * in a sing songy voice*

 

[Mussels]

now THAT is something new and interesting

 

[DZZRtt]

Quite interesting it is.
To bad, now, when russian rouble keeps falling i'm not sure if i can afford to buy second card for my rig.
Single 290X would cost me approximately 1030 usd

 

[FordGT90Concept]

I wonder if DX12 does the same.