AMD Is Still Looking At The Feasibility Of Mantle On Linux

[Herem]

He means Crossfire and he's right it does benefit greatly from Mantle since SLI/Crossfire is easily bottlenecked by the CPU even if you have a Haswell i7.

Thanks Blackout, it was early and I've previously used Nvidia hardware for many years.

[justmy2cents]

I can't see the point in Mantle, it only seems to be making a difference in rigs with crappy CPUs (or rather APUs). It seems to be focused on use cases where the CPU is the bottleneck, which is hardly ever the case. If you've got a pimped out gaming rig then it doesn't seem to make much difference.

offloading as much cpu as possible is positive no matter how your rig is built. if nothing else you don't switch hardware every day and older your hardware gets more there is a chance games would want to do more than your rig is capable. that's where offloading cpu is saving your ass

but, more to the point. mantle being built around this feature is a failure. opengl has it already (if i'm not mistaken from 4.3), dx12 is implementing its own solution of the same. there is simply no incentive to use one more api that brings nothing to the table and only works on some cards

[Sdar]

He means Crossfire and he's right it does benefit greatly from Mantle since SLI/Crossfire is easily bottlenecked by the CPU even if you have a Haswell i7. Pretty much everyone overclocks their i7 to 4.5 GHz to get more out of their SLI/Crossfire setup.

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/175881-amd-mantle-benchmarked-the-biggest-innovation-in-gaming-since-directx-9/3

Also even on a Single GPU setup with a R290X and Core i7 you'll gain more performance in CPU intensive scenarios like Multiplayer. It's not true that Mantle only shines with crap CPUs.

Indeed you have more fps with crossfire, sadly it increase stutter and random fps drops, i hope they fix it in 14.4 cause the stutter made any fps gains pointless.

[blackout23]

Indeed you have more fps with crossfire, sadly it increase stutter and random fps drops, i hope they fix it in 14.4 cause the stutter made any fps gains pointless.

Already fixed on Windows with Frame Pacing in the AMD driver.

[OneTimeShot]

So how open is Mantle?

I have concerns about how open AMD is willing to be on Mantle. There is no value in one company turning up with a solution and saying "everyone use this now". Are they going to let NVidia use it? Intel? What licence is it under? Patents? Is it very closely tied to AMD's chip designs?

My main hope is that this becomes a talking point for the Khronos group and something "like it but collabratively designed" comes out. Then they can call it OpenGL 5.0 or something. The last thing we need is yet another proprietary/patentented graphics API.

Basically, until I see MIT licensed Mesa code from AMD and documentation from a standards body like Khronos (with a thumbs up from Intel/Nvidia), I'm saying no...

[johnc]

No money in the budget for Linux support.

How much money did they throw at DICE to get it implemented in BF4? $8 million or something?

I have a generous offer. Just send me over... say... a mere ONE million... and I'll get it ported over to SteamOS for you guys.

[d2kx]

The real reason is AMD knows Mantle is only necessary for the next two years, and will be replaced by Direct3D 12 and advancements in OpenGL, which will offer the same advantages. So it is not worth the effort when they know it will fade away in the future.

[Kraut]

I just want them to open up the API to the general public. Even if the API is not stable right now and changes in the next versions. So developers can play around and from time to time may even give some useful feedback to AMD.

Also the oss driver developers have a chance to look into it. Because I would love to see an oss implementation of mantle. I image it to be easier to develop then OpenGL. Just wondering if we have to use HLSL on Linux. (Nobody want to write in different shader languages to be portable)

[blackout23]

No money in the budget for Linux support.

How much money did they throw at DICE to get it implemented in BF4? $8 million or something?

I have a generous offer. Just send me over... say... a mere ONE million... and I'll get it ported over to SteamOS for you guys.

I'll do it for 500.000 USD.

[johnc]

The real reason is AMD knows Mantle is only necessary for the next two years, and will be replaced by Direct3D 12 and advancements in OpenGL, which will offer the same advantages. So it is not worth the effort when they know it will fade away in the future.

It might be sooner than that.

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA-Talks-DX12-DX11-Efficiency-Improvements