What a week!
Valve's Steam OS and SteamBox, AMD's new GPUs, Audio DSP and low level API.
Can't wait for Valve's final announcement tomorrow.

On the API itself, I guess it makes sense, AMD has been talking about this for some years now, but it still caught me off guard. They own the consoles and since they are so much like a PC nowadays, they're now offering Mantle to PC users.

Can't wait for Battlefield 4, reviews and hands-on impressions on my PC 😀.

Absolutely crazy that both proprietary graphics APIs and audio DSPs are making a comeback. I'm curious if any of it will make a difference in the end. In any case Nvidia needs to push their PhysX and CUDA marketing hard now 🤣

Let's just hope the games that use this API are mandated to have OGL/D3D as a fallback and that the fallback has enough performance to play the game properly. I'd hate to buy a game that was Mantle only and then when Mantle is enevitably left by the wayside we have a game that is even more broken than just standard D3D/OGL. At least with those there is the possibility of a wrapper.

I also like how they state "used instead of DirectX 11" when they mean D3D 11. No wonder the common person confuses DirectX as being D3D.....unless Mantle is going to magically handle all DX functions.

Also how the hell and why would Nvidia "repurpose" AMD "technology". These companies have always had the capability there just never was a financial reason to do so.

DosFreak wrote:

Let's just hope the games that use this API are mandated to have OGL/D3D as a fallback and that the fallback has enough performance to play the game properly. I'd hate to buy a game that was Mantle only and then when Mantle is enevitably left by the wayside we have a game that is even more broken than just standard d3d/ogl. At least with those there is the possibility of a wrapper.

I also like how they state "used instead of DirectX 11" when they mean D3D 11. No wonder the common person confuses DirectX as being D3D.....unless Mantle is going to magically handle all DX functions.

They obviously mean D3D 11. It is a common mistake, I didn't even notice it when reading because I immediately thought of D3D. I get what you mean though.

In this time and age, I think it is impossible to do this move without OGL/D3D support. Way I see it, Mantle is going to be a marketing plus for AMD, much like Nvidia's PhysX. We'll just have to wait and see Battlefield 4 for the first example.

These are certainly very very interesting times 😀 .

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7371/understand … ics-api-for-gcn

http://www.dsogaming.com/news/amd-aims-to-giv … the-bottleneck/

Guess we'll be seeing a newer version of DX sooner than we thought..... DirectX 12 and Windows 9 anyone?

I'm (as always) a bit sceptical 😀

OpenGL and DirectX are very mature and work well. And suddenly AMD (who have a track record of writing great software) have got their own API?

To me this sounds more like a marketing stunt and seeing how bad BF4 runs it won't be hard to make it run faster on AMD card.

I think AMD is trying to find new ways to strengthen their brand. It's like NV with CUDA and Physx.

I expect Direct3D to get an overhaul with this new competition coming in from Mantle and Steam/Linux.

OpenGL has never been organized well enough to threaten modern D3D in games. It seems the Khronos Group is not managed well or something. OpenGL has certainly had ample opportunity to become the API of choice.

The difference is the openness. AMD isn't stopping anyone to write a Mantle wrapper AFAIK. Nvidia would be more than happy to stop all CUDA wrappers though 😀

DosFreak wrote:

http://www.dsogaming.com/news/amd-aims-to-giv … the-bottleneck/

Guess we'll be seeing a newer version of DX sooner than we thought..... DirectX 12 and Windows 9 anyone?

If Microsoft doesn't get rid of tiles and give us back our desktops, there won't be a Windows 9 or a Microsoft for very much longer.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I'm (as always) a bit sceptical 😀

OpenGL and DirectX are very mature and work well. And suddenly AMD (who have a track record of writing great software) have got their own API?

To me this sounds more like a marketing stunt and seeing how bad BF4 runs it won't be hard to make it run faster on AMD card.

Yeah and with ATi/AMD's past history of not even being able to write drivers that work well until two hardware generations later, I can't see them writing their own API that works any better than OGL or DX. I also can't see developers lining up to write exclusive versions of their games just for AMD video card owners. Including PhysX for nVidia owners is a lot different than rewriting the entire game from scratch in an environment that programmers are unaccustomed to to get maximum speed from AMD cards.

They're not rewriting a game from scratch 🤣. They're just using a low level API, it's not particularly hard to do and ensures better performance.

I think the problem with most AMD drivers is that they tend to break a lot of older games. There was some nasty bug with King's Bounty The Legend where the framerate would dive. Nvidia are a bit better in this regard, although it's always much better to use older drivers or even hardware to get older games to work. But then, you may lose the benefit of AA + AF at acceptable speeds.
Other than that, AMD/ATI drivers are great. This myth has to stop someday.

Yes, nVidia drivers aren't what we could call bug-free either. A lot of people is having great troubles with drivers > 314.22

sliderider wrote:

If Microsoft doesn't get rid of tiles and give us back our desktops, there won't be a Windows 9 or a Microsoft for very much longer.

I think it's more apt to say, "If Microsoft dares to get rid of desktop functionality", since I spend 99.999% of my time on Windows 8 in Desktop Mode. :P

Plus the tiles, as easy as they are to hate because of how different they are and because of how stubborn they are to customize, are faster to actually use than the Start Menu ever was.

As for the new Mantle API, unless it can run CIRCLES around OpenGL and Direct3D, it'll end up the same way Glide did, and even if it does become the next best thing for gaming, it's an open standard, so nVidia would simply adopt it themselves and still rival AMD for the GPU market... in fact, I think AMD realizes this. If anything, I'm more intrigued by the fact that AMD will support OpenGL integration of Mantle functionality, but nothing's been said about Direct3D. Considering OpenGL is nice and easy to program with compared to D3D and considering that D3D stuff prior to DX9 is partially broken on Windows 8, I'm still convinced Direct3D is on its way out... and will be kicking and screaming the whole while. x_x;

I never understood all this hate for DirectX. It is a hardware-independant API that made PC gaming what it is today. Honestly I feel misguided Glide nostalgia is clouding the views of many people on this issue. This "Mantle" is a step back into the 1990s. Remember games that you had a list of 3D accelerators/SVGA cards to pick from? We are going slowly back to that era, and stupid people are all screaming greeat lets get rid of eevil Microsoft.

It is exactly the same thing as when a few years ago Apple was the "underdog" and therefore "cool". Now it is popular and therefore "evil" and "for hipsters". If AMD has the opportunity to become an "evil monopoly" like MS it will become so, it is the natural law of business. Everybody hates MS yet nobody minds Google's spying. There are many, many examples. DirectX has saved PC gaming from being dominated by shitty performing software renderers and custom APIs for dog slow cards like the S3 Virge.

I love how AMD claims how Mantle is open. A low level API is not gonna be truly "open", it is more of a "anyone can code for our glorious GPUs" type of thing. Glide would still only work on Voodoos even if it was "open", that's the nature of low level APIs. Speed freaks scream "GREAT, MORE PERFORMANCE", yeah, at the cost of throwing out everything that made PC gaming so good, like compatibility with a wide range of hardware. It is not like PC have a performance problem with games, my 3 year old machine (ok, except the GTX 660) runs Metro 2033 , a supposedly "incredibly demanding" game in 1600x900 with everything on at 50-80 fps. I wonder what modern PC gamers whining about performance would say about US Navy Fighters or other such stuff that demanded a computer 6 years ahead of time to actually run at max.

We are not going back to that. Mantle can offer more performance though for those that have AMD cards. Kinda like how Nvidia markets PhysX and CUDA.
Let's see how it plays out.

I don't like Mantle simply because I don't like ATI/AMD Video hardware and drivers. I've had 3 cards die on me ever. 2 were voodoo 2s which I eventually solved by getting special fans, and the third was an ATI x850 xt PE. So you can chalk that up to luck of the draw I guess but what you can't chalk up is the shitty drivers ATI/AMD release. Seems like this is their attempt to fix their drivers in the most self serving manner.

Don't get me wrong I like multiple choices and companies that create competition for each other that's all good, I just wish it was a company that was trying harder than ATI/AMD is. So they decide to try and they do it in the worst way for the PC games industry, the way that works the best for them.

Phsyx is garbage by the way, it will never do anything but make eye candy. We need to be focusing on getting the tools to make all those low powered on die GPUs on the latest chips do the physics so we can actually use them in gameplay rather than just as window dressing.

I think Mantle is a bad thing.