AMD Announces The Radeon R9 290X

[chithanh]

The point is that the actual low-level AMD side will probably not come to Linux if AMD's track record is any indication.

What track record? I think the track record says the opposite. To name an example, XvBA API came to Linux rather early, but was limited to select AMD customers.

Even if AMD decides to withhold Mantle on Linux from the general public, they will almost certainly make it available to their embedded/arcade customers in some way.

And the people who think that since it's an "open API" it means that NVIDIA and Intel can just jump in, you seem to have no idea what a low-level API is.

I don't think that anybody reasonably expects that Intel or NVidia are going to support Mantle. It was publicly said that the Mantle API was created specifically for GCN. It seems plausible that it will work very poorly on other graphics architectures.

[sobkas]

Huh... interesting. I'll see if I can find out whether that's something we said or "just some random guy in the crowd"

Thanks !

Any more info about that?

[bridgman]

Any more info about that?

So far it seems probably that Raja mentioned "an upcoming announcement" and someone in the media interpreted "upcoming" as "tomorrow". Knowing Raja if he had meant "tomorrow" he would have said "tomorrow", not "upcoming".

[johnc]

So far it seems probably that Raja mentioned "an upcoming announcement" and someone in the media interpreted "upcoming" as "tomorrow". Knowing Raja if he had meant "tomorrow" he would have said "tomorrow", not "upcoming".

I would love to have some confirmation -- if you know -- as to whether or not this Mantle tech will be available on Linux.

[bridgman]

I would love to have some confirmation -- if you know -- as to whether or not this Mantle tech will be available on Linux.

I'll find out, but may not be able to say anything until the dev conference in a few weeks.

[Xeno]

This Mantle endavour raises few more questions in terms of Linux support. First I assue that'd mean completly new driver, in what form/which licence. Would it be proprietary in similar fashion to fglrx or FOSS libs + kernel bits. Now if foss, then how it is related to existing infrasrtucture (ttm&co). Knowing it's much low-level API I guess it'd need completly new memory manager and probably at least fewother changes in kernel. How those things affect chances of being rejected from mainline kernel inclusion.

[entropy]

I wonder what the long-term effect is if a game is shipped using the Mantle API only.
With OpenGL there's a good chance that you can run those games in, say, 10 years.
I'm not sure this is the case with Mantle...

As I see it, this low-level stuff shares the pros and cons of consoles:
A thin, high-performing layer to the hardware but therefore missing the abstraction
which allows easy backward compatibility, e.g. you cannot play your PS3 games on a PS4.

Do we really want that on the PC for the sake of a few more FPS/effects?

[mmstick]

This Mantle endavour raises few more questions in terms of Linux support. First I assue that'd mean completly new driver, in what form/which licence. Would it be proprietary in similar fashion to fglrx or FOSS libs + kernel bits. Now if foss, then how it is related to existing infrasrtucture (ttm&co). Knowing it's much low-level API I guess it'd need completly new memory manager and probably at least fewother changes in kernel. How those things affect chances of being rejected from mainline kernel inclusion.

If you read the article I linked earlier, Mantle is essentially integrated inside the existing Catalyst driver. By stating that it is 'sharing a common codebase between all OSs' implies any OS/console with the AMD Catalyst drivers will support Mantle. As for the open source/kernel support, looking at how much effort AMD is putting into the open source drivers right now, it wouldn't make sense for them not to program Mantle for the RadeonSI drivers.

[mmstick]

I wonder what the long-term effect is if a game is shipped using the Mantle API only.
With OpenGL there's a good chance that you can run those games in, say, 10 years.
I'm not sure this is the case with Mantle...

As I see it, this low-level stuff shares the pros and cons of consoles:
A thin, high-performing layer to the hardware but therefore missing the abstraction
which allows easy backward compatibility, e.g. you cannot play your PS3 games on a PS4.

Do we really want that on the PC for the sake of a few more FPS/effects?

As long as AMD continues to support Mantle with their graphics cards from here on out, there wouldn't be a problem. The games could simply be coded to fallback to OpenGL if the graphics card doesn't support Mantle.

[Xeno]

If you read the article I linked earlier, Mantle is essentially integrated inside the existing Catalyst driver. By stating that it is 'sharing a common codebase between all OSs' implies any OS/console with the AMD Catalyst drivers will support Mantle. As for the open source/kernel support, looking at how much effort AMD is putting into the open source drivers right now, it wouldn't make sense for them not to program Mantle for the RadeonSI drivers.

Then it revelance to Linux is vauge to say at best. One need to keep out from this crap. FGLRX gains are not worth problems it causes.