AMD Has A New Linux/OpenGL Driver Relationship Representative

[grndzro]

My guess is that AMD doesn't see any future for Mantle. That's why they opened it up to Khronos Group so they can reuse as much as possible.
This would explain why there seem to be already working OpenGL Next drivers (Demos during GDC). This is eventually how Mantle will make its way to Linux and to Windows for NVIDIA cards. With DX12 and OpenGL Next there is simply no reason for Mantle to exist. AMD is happy that mantle basically gets used. NVIDIA will be happy that they did not have to implement AMDs Mantle even though they kind of did.

Let's hope that the OpenGL Next implementation quality won't have as much difference between vendors as with legacy OpenGL. So devs can just port to OpenGL Next and everyone on Linux can enjoy performance that hits the hardware bottleneck and not the implementation quality bottleneck.

AMD has stated from the beginning that Mantle was not important. What was important was moving the paradigm forward.

And that is multithreading the main GPU thread to eliminate the IPC bottleneck associated with a single threaded main GPU thread.

And it worked spectacularly. DX12 now multithreads compatible AMD gpu's.

OpenGL-Next uses a part of Mantle for the multithreaded capability and rewrites it to take advantage of Nvidia's OGL extensions and modern OGL code.

Remember when AMD stated that Mantle was designed to be compatible with other architectures. Well they weren't lying. The main mantle code and benefits have always been separate from the proprietary code. You have Mantle then you have the GCN parts that interface with the hardware. It has always been able to accommodate other architectures. All that was ever needed was for the manufacturer to write code that tapped into Mantle.

[Ancurio]

AMD has stated from the beginning that Mantle was not important. What was important was moving the paradigm forward.

And that is multithreading the main GPU thread to eliminate the IPC bottleneck associated with a single threaded main GPU thread.

And it worked spectacularly. DX12 now multithreads compatible AMD gpu's.

OpenGL-Next uses a part of Mantle for the multithreaded capability and rewrites it to take advantage of Nvidia's OGL extensions and modern OGL code.

Remember when AMD stated that Mantle was designed to be compatible with other architectures. Well they weren't lying. The main mantle code and benefits have always been separate from the proprietary code. You have Mantle then you have the GCN parts that interface with the hardware. It has always been able to accommodate other architectures. All that was ever needed was for the manufacturer to write code that tapped into Mantle.

I take it you either work at AMD, or work for a games studio shipping Mantle code and somehow got around NDAs and are not just writing unconfirmed drivel, yes?

[blackout23]

AMD has stated from the beginning that Mantle was not important. What was important was moving the paradigm forward.

And that is multithreading the main GPU thread to eliminate the IPC bottleneck associated with a single threaded main GPU thread.

And it worked spectacularly. DX12 now multithreads compatible AMD gpu's.

OpenGL-Next uses a part of Mantle for the multithreaded capability and rewrites it to take advantage of Nvidia's OGL extensions and modern OGL code.

Remember when AMD stated that Mantle was designed to be compatible with other architectures. Well they weren't lying. The main mantle code and benefits have always been separate from the proprietary code. You have Mantle then you have the GCN parts that interface with the hardware. It has always been able to accommodate other architectures. All that was ever needed was for the manufacturer to write code that tapped into Mantle.

I wonder why it seems to be so god damn hard to implement OpenGL and have it perform well. Only NVIDIA seems to know how to do that.
Hopefully the OpenGL Next driver modell really fixes that and the old OpenGL can be implemented on top of it. I'm no expert but this slide from the Unity guy kind off hints that they want to move in that direction?

https://www.khronos.org/assets/uploads/developers/library/2014-siggraph-bof/OpenGL-Ecosystem-BOF_Aug14.pdf

Slide 102

[efikkan]

So Chajdas, any idea of what happened to Mantle on Linux?

There is no future for Mantle, it's already obsolete with Direct3D 12 and OpenGL 4.5.

Anyway, if "glNext" should end up being sort of "mantle"-like, it would be a step backwards. Every GPU developer knows the future of graphics is removing the need of massive amount of API calls and replacing it with shader features. So a Mantle-style API would still be bottlenecked in the long run.

[efikkan]

I wonder why it seems to be so god damn hard to implement OpenGL and have it perform well. Only NVIDIA seems to know how to do that.
Slide 102

True.

Since DirectX 10+ and OpenGL 3+ is very similar in terms of low-level functionality, and Nvidia has developed a driver model which implements this as Cg. This is the reason why Nvidia has offered new OpenGL features from day one for each new specification, since the features shared with Direct3D are already implemented in Cg and they only need to map it to OpenGL API calls. I don't know of the inner workings of Catalyst, but AMD seems to struggle a lot to keep up with OpenGL releases.

[Anteru]

Clarification

Hi guys, Matth?us here. The information is wrong, I'm not going to be the Linux/OpenGL driver representative. While it's true that I personally use Linux regularly, I'm joining the developer relations group which covers all current and next-gen APIs on all PC platforms with no particular focus on Linux. I'm not sure how someone concluded I'll be a representative for Linux, and I would appreciate if this news item gets removed, as the fact that I join AMD is not news for the Linux/OpenGL community.

[bridgman]

Hi guys, Matth?us here. The information is wrong, I'm not going to be the Linux/OpenGL driver representative. While it's true that I personally use Linux regularly, I'm joining the developer relations group which covers all current and next-gen APIs on all PC platforms with no particular focus on Linux. I'm not sure how someone concluded I'll be a representative for Linux, and I would appreciate if this news item gets removed, as the fact that I join AMD is not news for the Linux/OpenGL community.

Another beautiful hypothesis killed by an ugly fact

Welcome to AMD !!

[Anteru]

Thanks! Not sure what happened here, but I'm glad I got curious who this new AMD/Linux/OpenGL guy is going to be and clicked the headline

[Luke_Wolf]

Hi guys, Matth?us here. The information is wrong, I'm not going to be the Linux/OpenGL driver representative. While it's true that I personally use Linux regularly, I'm joining the developer relations group which covers all current and next-gen APIs on all PC platforms with no particular focus on Linux. I'm not sure how someone concluded I'll be a representative for Linux, and I would appreciate if this news item gets removed, as the fact that I join AMD is not news for the Linux/OpenGL community.

Phoronix is the tech equivalent of a tabloid, unfortunately due to the limited userbase of linux, it's the only site on the web that does linux benchmarking, and while there are other linux news sites, Phoronix is the only one that reliably keeps up with the news as opposed to being more of an editorial site, even as sensationalized as he makes it. in principle yes there's /. and reddit but... I'd argue that they're even worse.

[dungeon]

Thanks! Not sure what happened here, but I'm glad I got curious who this new AMD/Linux/OpenGL guy is going to be and clicked the headline

Phoronix's clickbait at is best