AMD Announces The Radeon R9 290X

[curaga]

While an indie game alone won't sway anyone's purchase decision, it's still positive PR for both AMD and that game. AMD gets to claim "X more games support Mantle", game gets free publicity for being mentioned in AMD press releases. It should be a win-win situation.

[smitty3268]

While it's their choice, it's shooting themselves in the foot. Just like Nintendo's requirement that to make a downloadable Wii (U) game you need to have a physical office.

Indie sales still generate legal tender.

But is anyone buying a new GPU so they can play an indie game? I think Mantle is more about getting benchmarks of Call of Duty online showing that AMD hardware is faster than the non-Mantle NVidia hardware it's compared against. Nobody does benchmarks of those indie games, and no one looks for them to base their purchases of hardware of them either. The indie games are likely to stick with OpenGL anyway, since they have to support that for other hardware and don't have the resources to maintain a bunch of different optional backends.

[curaga]

While it's their choice, it's shooting themselves in the foot. Just like Nintendo's requirement that to make a downloadable Wii (U) game you need to have a physical office.

Indie sales still generate legal tender.

[smitty3268]

2015 for public SDK? AMD are you nuts? Clearly you don't want any non-EA entity to support it.

It's been speculated that Mantle is just the XBox One API on PCs. If that's the case, then making it officially public in 2015 won't really matter for anyone AMD cares about. (Since they are already working on console games anyway)

[chithanh]

@curaga
Various news outlets report that EA/DICE have a timed exclusive on Mantle announcements until the AMD APU13 conference. It is expected that more developers will announce Mantle support for their middleware during the conference or shortly afterwards. But still no Mantle SDK for you unless you are special friends with AMD.

@dk2x
The statement by Raja Koduri is possibly referring to the Mantle-like OpenGL extensions which were hinted at by Graham Sellers, AMD Senior Manager of Software Development last month:

My mission is to expose GPU as #OpenGL extensions. If you can't get close to theoretical peak, perf., I failed.

Source: https://twitter.com/grahamsellers/st...75222469206016

[curaga]

2015 for public SDK? AMD are you nuts? Clearly you don't want any non-EA entity to support it.

[chithanh]

I guess we'll learn more at the AMD Dev conference in Nov. Or... maybe we won't.

I'm going with "you will".

One thing that won't be published in November is the SDK. That would probably mean no Mantle in the open source driver either:

VRZ: Any timeline to Mantle?s SDK being made public?

It could be as early as sometime next year or maybe the year after.

[Vim_User]

You were talking about the Cell SPE, not the PowerPC CPU. I was adding the latter. Or what part is mentioning the PowerPC CPU here:

Cell is a microprocessor microarchitecture of an Accelerated processing unit that combines a general-purpose Power Architecture core of modest performance with streamlined coprocessing elements

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_CPU
The PowerPC core is part of the Cell CPU, so it doesn't have to be mentioned explicitly.

[Asariati]

I already said that... Read more, post less...

You were talking about the Cell SPE, not the PowerPC CPU. I was adding the latter. Or what part is mentioning the PowerPC CPU here:

The reason theres no PS3 support on the PS4 is that there is no way to emulate the Cell CPU fast enough inside of the price and thermal envelope of the PS4. Furthermore theres no market for the low end Cell hardware thus there aren't any low power variants out there to have dedicated hardware for it like was the case with PS2 compatibility in early PS3s.

[Kivada]

And maybe because the PS4 CPU has a complete different architecture/instruction set than the PS3 CPU.

I already said that... Read more, post less...