News - AMD Mantle support coming to GTA V and CoD: AW says report

I will say as I do a log of video editing I keep considering jumping to an AMD 8 core, but the potential loss on gaming worries me.

But with mantle and directx 12 both showing better utilisation of multiple processor cores jumping AMD might end up being a win win situation for me.

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Originally Posted by ZaO

Hmm. I'm not sure about this. But I can't say I can prove you wrong either. We'll see what happens further down the road :P But either way - a better optimised Api for pc's is very much welcomed :)

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Well, ok saying it won't make it faster is probably not correct either. A new API could easily do certain things faster so for example a certain routine which DirectX11 has to be done in what might be rather inefficient might be far faster and more efficient in Mantle which after all starts with GCN as it's base, while DirectX11 might have lots legacy bloat.

Since the current Mantle games are probably all quick patches/hacks, maybe later stuff will perform faster. But for now getting rid of the CPU bottleneck is no bad thing.

A lot of the hostile discussion on certain forums seems to miss this. Rather suspect that if Mantle had been Nvidia's idea, a lot of that hostility would not exist. But for these PC Masterrace people don't seem to understand, is that one of the best showcases for Mantle at the moment is a OTT gaming machine 2-4 high-end GPUs.

So a system with an overclocked LGA2011 processor and 3-4 R9-290X playing BF4 is likely to outperform any similar non-Mantle system by quite a bit.

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Originally Posted by kompukare

Well, ok saying it won't make it faster is probably not correct either. A new API could easily do certain things faster so for example a certain routine which DirectX11 has to be done in what might be rather inefficient might be far faster and more efficient in Mantle which after all starts with GCN as it's base, while DirectX11 might have lots legacy bloat.

Since the current Mantle games are probably all quick patches/hacks, maybe later stuff will perform faster. But for now getting rid of the CPU bottleneck is no bad thing.

A lot of the hostile discussion on certain forums seems to miss this. Rather suspect that if Mantle had been Nvidia's idea, a lot of that hostility would not exist. But for these PC Masterrace people don't seem to understand, is that one of the best showcases for Mantle at the moment is a OTT gaming machine 2-4 high-end GPUs.

So a system with an overclocked LGA2011 processor and 3-4 R9-290X playing BF4 is likely to outperform any similar non-Mantle system by quite a bit.

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Well I will test Bf4 again with my setup once the next expansion is out, and see if it helps. Because my Cpu does get maxed out at times while playing it. But last time I played Bf4 with mantle (and all the times before), it was giving me some terrible slow down issues (I think there was a memory leak issue with Vram). But in fairness, I couldn't launch the game at all after a 1GB patch a couple days ago. And I'd left it on the Direct3D/DirectX setting last time I'd played haha..

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Originally Posted by ZaO

Well I will test Bf4 again with my setup once the next expansion is out, and see if it helps. Because my Cpu does get maxed out at times while playing it. But last time I played Bf4 with mantle (and all the times before), it was giving me some terrible slow down issues (I think there was a memory leak issue with Vram). But in fairness, I couldn't launch the game at all after a 1GB patch a couple days ago. And I'd left it on the Direct3D/DirectX setting last time I'd played haha..

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Mantle is a bit of double-sided sword. Not unexpectedly, direct-to-the-metal requires more or different work from the developer. That's why all those who were expecting a driver update from AMD to fix crossfire might have been somewhat optimistic.

I guess at some stage the Mantle API will get released and someone will write an article about; I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that the developers have to do a lot of work they didn't used to have to do under DirectX. Maybe not the Crossfire stuff, but the memory leaks or vram allocation might be something which is nothing to do with the driver.

GTA V could really use Mantle. Getting rid of the CPU bottleneck would be astounding.

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Originally Posted by VijaySathyan

GTA V could really use Mantle. Getting rid of the CPU bottleneck would be astounding.

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Are you Beta testing it or something?

The amount of engines that are now supporting mantle is nice however I personally plan on waiting a year for mantle to really kick in before I consider a move from Nvidia to AMD. However if mantle starts taking hold it should push Nvidia to incorporate it or push to make a similar technology itself.

It's nice to see mantle being used more in place of direct X, even as a devout Nvidia GPU user. Any API to improve games can only benefit game design and performance across the board.

I hope AMD do bring Mantle over to Linux though - especially for SteamOS. (Ubuntu is my primary platform, Windows is really only used for games that doesn't run on Linux that's it)

ZaO my friend is in the same boat as you are with mantle but I have had no problems since the 14.4 drivers came out a few months back its been smooth as silk @ 1440p.

This might interst people (something I did a couple of months ago to show my clan mantle):

Thought I would see if there is any difference between mantle and dx 11 on my rig using the built in Thief benchmark.

Results

DX 11

Min 27.4
Max 48.8
Avg 33.2

Mantle

Min 38.6
Max 64.7
Avg 46.6

Using the average fps Mantle on my rig is roughly 40% faster than DX. Also bare in mind if you have thief im running 1440p maxed out (very high preset 8* AA settings and AMD 14.4 WQHL drivers before trying to compare results. Rest of my pc specs are in my profile:)

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Originally Posted by dfour

ZaO my friend is in the same boat as you are with mantle but I have had no problems since the 14.4 drivers came out a few months back its been smooth as silk @ 1440p.

This might interst people (something I did a couple of months ago to show my clan mantle):

Thought I would see if there is any difference between mantle and dx 11 on my rig using the built in Thief benchmark.

Results

DX 11

Min 27.4
Max 48.8
Avg 33.2

Mantle

Min 38.6
Max 64.7
Avg 46.6

Using the average fps Mantle on my rig is roughly 40% faster than DX. Also bare in mind if you have thief im running 1440p maxed out (very high preset 8* AA settings and AMD 14.4 WQHL drivers before trying to compare results. Rest of my pc specs are in my profile:)

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I just read this lastnight: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/amd-ma...iew-32995.html
Those tests were done in June. So they may not be as relevant now. But the situation has not been so good for BF4. The main benefit has been for those like yourself, with high end graphics cards. And at least at the time of their tests, only those that have at least 4GB of Vram. But Mantle seemed to be working a lot better for me since the newest maps in bf4. Still had some lockups on occasion. But I definitely noticed a difference. Well compared to how it ran on any of the maps before this dlc. Maybe these new maps just run better anyway. I don't know.. It's early days still. But it's pretty cool having an Api designed by Amd. I'm optimistic about it :)

Very interesting article there Zao.

I feel bf4 is hard to benchmark anyway as to get a real feel you would need to have a scenario online with say 32 players that is repeatable constantly to get an accurate take on frame rates etc not just a scripted part of the single player. I dont have a lesser graphics card here capable of playing bf4/thief so cant do any other tests on either myself. I could run in medium settings no/2*AA on thief to see how that changes things if that would be any interest to people.

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Originally Posted by dfour

Very interesting article there Zao.

I feel bf4 is hard to benchmark anyway as to get a real feel you would need to have a scenario online with say 32 players that is repeatable constantly to get an accurate take on frame rates etc not just a scripted part of the single player. I dont have a lesser graphics card here capable of playing bf4/thief so cant do any other tests on either myself. I could run in medium settings no/2*AA on thief to see how that changes things if that would be any interest to people.

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That's very true. It's the multiplayer part of bf that matters. And that's hard to get reliable benchmarks for. But the issues I've had with mantle seem pretty common place for those that don't have the top tier cards. But it is getting there :)

I'll reserve judgement until I see how Mantle performs in the real world. Somehow I can't see Nvidia getting left behind.