AMD Wants Mantle On Linux, OS X, Mobile Devices

[Nille]

Without any access to documentation, I can't say what Mantle requires and why the 5000/6000 cards aren't supported. But AMD did mention that it would work on their competitors hardware, given it meets Mantle's requirements and of course they create their own Mantle driver.

On the Tech Talks there is often talk about the memory managed and that the Developer has to track all Resources. This is a very clear sign that its necessary.

But their Northern Islands and EverGreen cards are as similar to GCN as it gets.

Thats totally different asics. Not even the ALUs are the same.

[Dukenukemx]

How do you substantiate it? Its reasonable that Memory Management its a requirement. To derive the Mantle Hardware requirements from the performance is ridiculous.

Without any access to documentation, I can't say what Mantle requires and why the 5000/6000 cards aren't supported. But AMD did mention that it would work on their competitors hardware, given it meets Mantle's requirements and of course they create their own Mantle driver. But their Northern Islands and EverGreen cards are as similar to GCN as it gets.

But if you really wanna know, ask the people behind the open source AMD drivers. They're about as unbiased of an opinion of AMD's DX11 based cards as it gets. I've heard them reuse code from the Northern Islands for Southern Islands. I doubt the hardware is so dissimilar that you couldn't get Mantle working on them.

[Nille]

I really doubt Radeon HD5000 and HD6000 series cards couldn't work with Mantle. Tests have shown there's little difference in performance. Also consider this, how does AMD expect Nvidia or Intel to adopt Mantle when their older generation of cards, which have the most similar architecture to GCN, don't work?

It's all marketing.

How do you substantiate it? Its reasonable that Memory Management its a requirement. To derive the Mantle Hardware requirements from the performance is ridiculous.

[Dukenukemx]

Yeah, I think one of the minimum requirements is unified address space/virtual memory support. So anything older than GCN won't work (as a technical limitation).

I really doubt Radeon HD5000 and HD6000 series cards couldn't work with Mantle. Tests have shown there's little difference in performance. Also consider this, how does AMD expect Nvidia or Intel to adopt Mantle when their older generation of cards, which have the most similar architecture to GCN, don't work?

It's all marketing.

[ChrisXY]

Linux DE is on the verge of embracing OpenGL 2.1 and bits of 3.x for KDE 5

This is kde 4.x:

[aidanjt]

And if wishes were horses, fglrx would have been usable a decade ago. Wants are endless, AMD, if you don't put in the resources to make it happen, they wont.

[Andrecorreia]

???

To the ill-informed: OS X is OpenGL 4.1 throughout. No OS on the planet matches that fact. We aren't talking about OpenGL 4.4 for a Game, but OpenGL 4.1 for every bit of 2D/3D built-into the OS from the ground up.

When Apple pushes out OpenGL 4.3 people will still whine it hasn't hit 5.x or whatever the next major version of OpenGL spec gets released.

Meanwhile, Windows isn't OpenGL accelerated for obvious reasons. Linux DE is on the verge of embracing OpenGL 2.1 and bits of 3.x for KDE 5 and GNOME 4.x. Maybe in 3-5 years they'll be at 4.x.

you are sleeping for many years i think

[johnc]

There's a GNOME 4.x? Man I can't wait to see what that's going to be like. Will they double down on the insanity or actually come to their senses?

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Apple cares a lot about graphics APIs/Performance..... Just not on the desktop.

To the ill-informed: OS X is OpenGL 4.1 throughout. No OS on the planet matches that fact. We aren't talking about OpenGL 4.4 for a Game, but OpenGL 4.1 for every bit of 2D/3D built-into the OS from the ground up.

When Apple pushes out OpenGL 4.3 people will still whine it hasn't hit 5.x or whatever the next major version of OpenGL spec gets released.

Meanwhile, Windows isn't OpenGL accelerated for obvious reasons. Linux DE is on the verge of embracing OpenGL 2.1 and bits of 3.x for KDE 5 and GNOME 4.x. Maybe in 3-5 years they'll be at 4.x.

[GreatEmerald]

I have to say I like what I've seen so far (high level bits). They are exposing GPU engines (Graphics, Compute, DMA) and memory to the developer, allow to feed the command buffers directly and handle memory allocation. This means a bit more work for developers using this API, but also more control over GPU (and simpler drivers ).

That's the main thing I'm really not sure about. The Mantle developers really see it as an advantage, but I wouldn't be certain of that. Looking at their presentations, it seems it's a Windows background, where all drivers are horrible and black boxes, as opposed to Linux where be have all the OSS drivers and Gallium3D. On Windows, sure, the ability to go on a lower level means you can sidestep the drivers that could be misbehaving, since you have no chance of fixing them. But with OSS drivers, you can very well fix them, and that helps not only your game, but all of the others as well. That's a great way of moving forward. Without that, there will be a lot of code duplication.

What's worse, Mantle is set to pushing the issues from the driver to the game. And we can change drivers, but games so far have stayed proprietary. So if the game developers made some optimisations, it will run fine on the current generation of graphics cards, but what if the next generation comes and the old code is no longer optimal? The developers no longer maintain the game, so all the bugs stay there forever.

Another issue of going low-level like that is that, as the Mantle developers said, there is no security. And that's very bad. There is a good reason why processors got protected mode instead of real mode. You can't trust game developers to implement everything correctly. What if they do something that makes the GPU lock up? That's it, you have an equivalent of a kernel panic/BSOD. That should never be allowed. GPU bugs that cause lockups are bad enough, but now you also add another source of critical bugs ? one you can't do anything about, because games are proprietary.