Does Mantle... work enough to rock your world and change your next Graphics Card?

[Zak33]

I'm intrigued... quite deeply intrigued

Does Mantle make large gains into performance and eyecandy really?

And if it does... will it effect your next card and force you into the AMD camp?

Plenty of games signing up.. but is it snake oil or does it really count

I have no idea... and I'm asking you lot. Is Mantle for real... or is it really clever Facebook Style "Like " marketing?

the boys thought not....
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/17...-cpus-not-gpus

and Thief got better!
http://hexus.net/tech/news/graphics/...o-patch-thief/

but would a patch of Thief have sorted it with AMD cards anyway?

[shaithis]

In a nutshell "No"

But then I've historically purchased intel CPUs, which in a lot of cases negates the need for mantle.

Mantle is for budget builds and massive multi-GPU configs. Although after having crossfire twice, I doubt I'd ever want to try it a third time.

Things may change, if devs feel they have more CPU time to play with thanks to mantle/DX12 they may push more to the CPU but I expect low level APIs are already being used on XBox One and are we more likely to get an XBO port or a specially written version designed for mantle?

[scaryjim]

... I expect low level APIs are already being used on XBox One and are we more likely to get an XBO port or a specially written version designed for mantle? ...

IIRC, overhead for porting from XBO to Mantle is meant to be less than porting to DX11, and AMD are also meant to have released tools to make porting from Mantle to DX11 and DX12 easier, so it might end up being better for studios to port to Mantle then to DX11 and, eventually, to DX12 - particularly if porting to Mantle does do some of the work of porting to the other APIs; I am not a game dev and therefore cannot confirm or deny that

Ultuimately it would make no difference to my purchasing choices because I am sufficiently happy with a moderate level of graphical details and lower average framerates - most of my gaming is done on my laptop (A10-4600M) or HTPC (A6-3670K), neither of which have discrete graphics. I've just given my actual "gaming" machine to a mate who has health problems and struggles to use a game pad for long periods, so he can see whether keyboard/mouse is better for him; but that was only a low-power Phenom II (yes Zak, *that* low-power Phenom II ) and a Radeon 7750, so hardly a monster rig.

OTOH that does mean I'll generally be playing with kit at the end of the market where Mantle should make a difference, so the development of Mantle does matter to me: a lot depends on whether any games I want to play come out with Mantle support. None of my current rigs have GCN (and I didn't get round to testing the 7750 before I shipped it out) so it's a bit moot at the minute, but tbh I can't see me moving away from AMD APUs in the near future as they are pretty much the best fit for my use case. At that point I guess a lot will depend on how support is balanced between DX11, Mantle, and DX12. But if I was a gamer on a budget and the games I wanted to play had Mantle support, I'd definitely be considering an FX6300/8320 (not the 6350 or 8350 because with Mantle you shouldn't need the higher clock speed ) and a Radeon graphics card. But those games having Mantle support is a fairly big proviso, and actually impacts the choice of CPU more than the choice of GPU - even without Mantle the AMD card may well be better value than its nearest nvidia equivalent: Mantle (and DX12, when it arrives) simply means you can afford to drop to a cheaper, lower-clocked CPU without sacrificing performance.

[Zak33]

but that was only a low-power Phenom II (yes Zak, *that* low-power Phenom II )

glad it's well and still using next to no power!

So.. in short.. Mantle makes mid to low range gaming rigs more effective on the Mantle games?

[Agent]

glad it's well and still using next to no power!

So.. in short.. Mantle makes mid to low range gaming rigs more effective on the Mantle games?

It just allows the GPU to be less bottlenecked by a slower CPU. Nothing more.
It seems to have a lot of hype around it. Performance is nice. Free performance is even nicer. But it's probably not going to make a difference to many people on Hexus.

You need to have a game that supports it. You need to have an AMD card. You need a setup where the GPU is being bottlenecked.

Hopefully AMD support it for many years to come (that's my biggest worry) because it's a nice idea. I'd assume AMD are going to build around Mantle more and more as time goes on.

Keep in mind that nVidia are trying to hit back though with the simplier approach of better, more optimised drivers: http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/17...from-the-wings

[scaryjim]

... Keep in mind that nVidia are trying to hit back though with the simplier approach of better, more optimised drivers ...

Hang on - NVidia have suddenly found 64% more performance from driver optimisations? How shoddy was their driver before that if the best they could do was only ~ 60% of the available performance? I smell shenanigans.... Plus driver optimisations are still going to depend on the power of the underlying system to get the additional performance: I'd be interested to see some comparisons of the new drivers under different sub-systems to see if they favour any particular platforms...

As to Mantle, it's very much about moving away from single thread performance as a key factor in game performance. DX11 still runs a lot of functionality in a single thread, which can bottleneck rendering, particularly on CPUs with lower single-threaded performance - i.e. AMD CPUs, currently. MS have already shown DX12 demos which spread that load across more threads, removing that bottleneck. Mantle does a similar thing: it spreads the work more evenly between multiple threads, reducing the reliance on single-threaded performance. MS have recognised this is important (particularly in their move towards mobile, where single thread performance is lower) and built it in to DX12. Mantle should work particularly well on low-end AMD CPUs like the Kabini-based AM1 platform, or the aforementioned Phenom II X4 905e (I'll try to talk my friend into running a couple of Mantle benchmarks - a 2.5GHz quad core should be a perfect target for Mantle lifting a CPU bottleneck), where a heavily loaded single thread could stall rendering.

Of course, the system would also have to have a sufficiently high-end GPU for the rendering bottleneck to fall back on the CPU: in a Kabini system using the onboard graphics that simply wouldn't be the case. So it's very situational.

[KeyboardDemon]

I would not change from AMD to nVidia for Mantle. I would change from nVidia to AMD IF there was sufficient evidence to suggest that AMD GPUs would outperform the equivalently priced nVidia GPUs, but the decision would be based on raw performance and not Mantle.

[Agent]

Hang on - NVidia have suddenly found 64% more performance from driver optimisations? How shoddy was their driver before that if the best they could do was only ~ 60% of the available performance? I smell shenanigans....

We've been seeing these kind of improvements from the beginning of GPU computing though. But this will be in a very specific situation. AMD (or ATI) have had the same sort of improvements too.
All it takes is a new game, game engine, weird resolution, new intermediary language.....that does something different and the drivers could probably benefit from a change to make it faster.

Drivers will and will always have to react to the market.

Have nVidia managed a 64% performance increase? Probably - in an ideal situation where there was previously an issue. I personally saw a near 50% increase from a driver update which sorted an AA issue out in Eve. I saw much higher than that when swapping the Glide / 3DFX minidriver out for an optimised one in Unreal

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It was SLI scaling in a game where SLI was broken IIRC.

HardOCP also said the GTX780TI max temperature with the newer drivers was increased to 87C meaning the GPU also boosts higher more consistently now.

[LtMatt]

I'm intrigued... quite deeply intrigued

Does Mantle make large gains into performance and eyecandy really?

And if it does... will it effect your next card and force you into the AMD camp?

Plenty of games signing up.. but is it snake oil or does it really count

I have no idea... and I'm asking you lot. Is Mantle for real... or is it really clever Facebook Style "Like " marketing?

the boys thought not....
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/17...-cpus-not-gpus

and Thief got better!
http://hexus.net/tech/news/graphics/...o-patch-thief/

but would a patch of Thief have sorted it with AMD cards anyway?

Mantle is great, the performance gains are real and in some cases they are big. Single card users will see less of a gain, but multi gpu users get a huge boost from Mantle. Remember Mantle is only beta at the moment and it's already swinging the pendulum back in favour of AMD. In BF4, Thief, PvZ and Battlefield Hardline my 290P crossfire setup beats out equivalent 780 SLI setups with ease. Those 780 setups probably cost nearly double what i paid for my 290 cards too. Mantle is not just about extra fps and alleviating cpu bottlenecks too, it also delivers a superior, smoother gaming experience compared to DirectX11. Quite simply, it's different gravy.

If you fancy seeing Mantle in action, check out my youtube channel. https://www.youtube.com/user/TheMattB81/videos

[dfour]

I found a 40% gain in frame rates on thief under mantle See my post (#26) in this thread

http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-news/3...ml#post3322321

This is with a 290x and a fx 8350 @4.7 gig @ 1440p so my systems not exactly mid level IMHO.

[Askew]

Not enough games support it to sway me, I'd apply the same logic to the idea of switching from AMD to Nvidia just for PhysX.

I know it's not the same thing because Mantle is an API but D3D is still king by an enormous margin.

[talus]

From what I've read and my friedns with AMD cards tell me Mantle or No Mantle shouldn't be the thing to sway your choice of what card to get. That said it can't hurt.

[shaithis]

Mantle is not just about extra fps and alleviating cpu bottlenecks too, it also delivers a superior, smoother gaming experience compared to DirectX11. Quite simply, it's different gravy.

Mantle is ALL about alleviating CPU bottlenecks. The smoother framerates are due to shoddy AMD drivers, nVidia owners never suffered the terrible frame-pacing issues that AMD are trying to fix in crossfire with Mantle....and should be fixing outside of Mantle also!

[Askew]

Mantle is ALL about alleviating CPU bottlenecks. The smoother framerates are due to shoddy AMD drivers, nVidia owners never suffered the terrible frame-pacing issues that AMD are trying to fix in crossfire with Mantle....and should be fixing outside of Mantle also!

The frame pacing issue is still prevalent with Xfire? I thought they allegedly fixed it months ago?

I know Nvidia had a hardware solution in place beforehand and the AMD solution was software but after I saw the graphs that pcper came up with highlighting the issue in the first place I subsequently saw post patch graphs that looked much improved.

[kalniel]

Mantle is ALL about alleviating CPU bottlenecks. The smoother framerates are due to shoddy AMD drivers, nVidia owners never suffered the terrible frame-pacing issues that AMD are trying to fix in crossfire with Mantle....and should be fixing outside of Mantle also!

The shoddy drivers argument doesn't stand up - if AMD couldn't make good drivers then Mantle would suffer from the same problem - it's the same team for both as far as I can tell. However LtMatt's statement that it's delivering a superior experience aside from CPU efficiency and fps don't stand up either - there are no extra experience factors that Mantle enables outside of those so anything he's experiencing is a placebo effect.

edit: Yes, frame pacing is comprehensively fixed these days - it's at least as good if not better than SLi I think, but ideally you want a GCN 1.1 card to get the best benefit.