This may be a bit of a rant...you've been warned.
Why is everyone so hyped up on Mantle? I understand it's interesting and could be a huge benefit for AMD, but will it really benefit from AMD CPUs as well? I mean the API is for their GPUs. Also we haven't seen any performance figures, is that not a red flag to anyone else? I'm thinking AMD is hyping this, the consoles run such low clocked 8-cores that I don't think an 8-core AMD CPU will have any benefit over an Intel 4-core going forward, please correct me if I'm wrong. Lastly as a side discussion, AMD has improved drivers and Crossfire performance, but it appears to me that Nvidia is still king of the hill on drivers and SLI plus Nvidia has a huge lead on SteamOS (Linux) drivers.
Please put in your two-cents, I want to hear other people's opinions on this subject.
tl;dr: I'm not sold on Mantle.
it appears to me that Nvidia is still king of the hill on drivers
I see no difference whatsoever between Nvidia and AMD drivers in case of single-GPU systems on Windows. And I like AMD control panel way more, for that matter. And it's been like this at least since HD 5000. I have no idea why Nvidia is considered to have better drivers.
I want Mantle to be something that everyone could benefit from, but I don't expect that corporations like Microsoft and Nvidia will allow it to.
I also think that SLI and Crossfire are not needed unless you are running two or more top GPUs which only a very small minority of people do. Having to buy a better motherboard and a better power supply negates pretty much all price/performance advantage of two cheaper GPU against an expensive one, and you get less stability in any case.
I understand your points perfectly. I am excited for low level APIs, and I am sure that Mantle will not be the only solution of its kind. Low level APIs will probably become much more of an established norm. This is lost on fanboys. Mantle has just given fanboys a chance to shout their mouths off, for whatever it is worth.
Because Mantle is able to be embedded in Battlefield 4 retroactively, it is quite possible that Nvidia could produce a solution that can be fitted retroactively. I know that Battlefield 4 will be using Nvidia APIs in addition to Mantle. Albeit, they are not "low level". Games are perfectly capable of being optimised for respective hardware and solutions, from both sides. So when that solution appears, both sides of the market will be served with these innovations/developments.
The benefits of low level API cannot be understated. We don't have numbers to crunch. I just want to feel like I am getting the best out of my hardware. Whatever hardware I choose.
I'm unsure about drivers and such. Nvidia certainly have the performance crown. Though, it's not going to be worth the premium to many people.
Well from what I understand Mantle supposedly makes use/better/more use of 8 cores whereas a lot of games are just using 4 which is why in older titles Intel CPU's perform much better. However, in most newer games they are using 6 or more cores which is why in games like battlefield 4, the performance difference between using the i5 and the 8350 is practically nothing.
The idea of Mantle is to give hardware level optimisation like on a console to the developers. I think the performance gains will be more down to how much time they spend on it but with developers like DICE and the makers of Star citizen on board, surely it must offer some kind of considerable performance boost otherwise they wouldn't have bothered.
SLI and crossfire is a good argument for Nvidia, however the differences in frame pacing are slim with most games now and the performance difference usually depend on which game is best optimised for them. AMD win on games like tomb raider, Bioshock and Metro whereas Nvidia win in games like Batman and Borderlands. So your choice should depend on which games you play. That being said, according to the Steam hardware survey, something like 8% of people use SLI/crossfire and is decreasing due the more powerful single card solutions so does it really even matter that much?
On the Linux driver side of things, I thought it was the other way around? AMD seem to have their latest drivers on Linux whilst Nvidia don't. And they just got that huge performance boost with the Kernel update.
I think its a great idea on paper but people are getting far too excited about it. AMD is sounding off about it, and I think Berserker is right that it is at the moment nothing more than fanwar. I also think its going to get worse if we see a decent performance boost in battlefield 4, when ultimately what matters is whether or not game devs actually take it up. Only a handful of titles are supporting it at this time and its titles that win people over ultimately.
There is also a huge amount of speculation about the ease of porting next gen console titles, which again is all unsubstantiated. I would love to see it happen, but I am not holding my breath.
I only say that (and it might not even be driver related) because Nvidia seem to have higher minimum FPS and less microstutter. Just reporting what I've observed.
Nvidia drivers on linux are crap.
AMD has the better drivers, in both open source and in proprietary.
As for mantle. It will have an improvement in games, only if the developers use it.
Just like PhysX for nvidia, it can speed up games significantly, but seeing as how a lot of PC games are crappy console ports, a lot of games don't even use PhysX.
Mantle allows up to 8 cores, and that will boost the FPS on the 8 series AMD cpus a little. But seeing as how games don't really use 100% on 4 cores, the extra cores wont provide THAT much benefit.
The real improvement (If used) will be low level hardware access. Consoles can get away with having crappy hardware because the developers get really low, if not direct hardware access. PC games don't get that, and it slows them down.
DirectX is evil.
When DirectX is gone, there will be improvement in speeds, and graphical quality will improve 10 fold. (again, IF used properly)
And I'm sure Nvidia wont take this sitting down, and will develop their own version of mantle very soon.
I'm disappointed in AMD for hyping something and having any hard numbers to back it up, it makes me feel like they are trying to pull a fast one on everyone. I guess I just have to wait for the hard numbers and go from there.
I feel that they over-hyped the 290x. It hasn't stopped people talking about it. It did work wonders for the prices of top-tier cards.
In all honesty, Nvidia and AMD are just two sides of the same coin. We shouldn't really give a fuck what either of them tell us.
"We have the fastest card" ... debatable
I entered "nvidia amd frametimes" in google.
Got this as a first result
http://uk.hardware.info/reviews/3991/3/amd-radeon-hd-7970-ghz-edition-vs-nvidia-geforce-gtx-680-frametimes-review-battlefield-3
Not claiming anything but it's just funny.
That's without mentioning the fact AMD's driver were able to increase performance across the 7000 series greatly.
I hear you but I believe that is a game that was optimized for AMD via the Frostbite engine. I'm just saying on average Newegg and Linus have both reported that Nvidia has lower microstutter and higher minimum frame rate. Let me look for those videos. I'll get back to you today on that.
They haven't released Mantle performance numbers to the public (yet, wait 3 days) because they're not selling it to the public. It's not for public use, it's for developers. Also, as far as anyone publicly knows, it isn't actually finalized yet. With a low level library, minor changes can easily cause big changes in performance.
Also, 290 and 290X crossfire are spectacular across the board, beating Titan SLI in almost every case, especially above 1080p. That's with both framerates and latencies. Granted, that doesn't filter down into the rest of their GPUs, because it's a hardware solution, but even their older GPUs are getting better driver support all the time. Except for some left over edge cases, crossfire (sub-290) is indistinguishable from SLI.
As for driver support, unless you can show an actual statistical difference between companies as far as crashing, artifacting, image quality, etc., saying one is better than the other is talking out of your ass.
How about comparing the the 290x to the titans newer faster brother.
looks like mantle is gona take awhile
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-mantle-battlefield-4,25560.html
I have heard through the grapevine that Mantle has put up some impressive numbers. I think it translated from anywhere between 15% and 40% more FPS.
And luckily, it may not be exclusive to AMD. Rather dependent on people adopting it.
It could be cool, I hope we do get a low level OPEN api to replace directx and opengl. It will have to work on both amd and nvidia for it to take off though, and mantel can work with nvidia gpus if they choose to implement it from what I understand so thats good.
AMD has intended for Mantle to be an open standard. They still have plenty to gain with Mantle being open:
For the last several generations, AMD has had more computationally powerful GPUs which somehow couldn't quite get as much gaming performance as Nvidia's weaker GPUs. It seems that either:
1. Nvidia's architectures have been somehow more tailored for gaming, or
2. Nvidia's drivers make more efficient use of the available hardware.
An API designed and introduced by AMD could help with 1, and a much more simple API with a thin driver and no responsibility for driver-level optimizations solves 2. Mantle is both. If Mantle becomes an open and widely adopted standard, AMD's traditionally more powerful GPUs have the upper hand.
A 680 using all of it's compute resources would barely beat a stock 7870 XT, and get quite easily destroyed by a 7970.
Of course, that isn't so much the case with the 290X versus 780ti. They are almost dead even in both computing power and game performance.
I didn't ask for all that. I do have an understanding about much of it. You can see that from other Mantle related threads. I was implying that the openess is meaningless if people fail to adopt it.
All things considered, it will be fantastic for budget users. There's a 7850 with a price of £99 with about £2 shipping, in one or two UK E merchants. The 290x and 780ti probably matter little. There's already enough performance there to compensate.