AMD Mantle as Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2014-05-07
·
855 words · ~4 min read
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mantle is in a nutshell AMD's initiative to create a new programming model to
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fully exploit the capabilities of modern gpus to improve graphics performance the
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idea is to give developers the ability to have their game engines interact
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directly with the hardware to reduce unnecessary overhead that is introduced
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by other apis most developers who are embracing mantle seem to be particularly
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fed up with the shortcomings and lack of innovation from microsoft with respect
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to directx okay so it's better but there are a lot of questions that remain i
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mean is this just plug and play what games does it work with well right now
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mantle is supported only on Windows platforms and only in games that are
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specifically coded to take advantage of it including battlefield 4 and star
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citizen there is no Linux or steam os support for now and while there were
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rumors early on that the xbox one and playstation 4 would support it that was
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a misunderstanding mantle allows pc
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developers to improve performance by letting them better control the graphics
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hardware and by allowing them to use techniques that were previously limited
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to console game development on the pc
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that should in theory facilitate porting games from a console to a mantle enabled
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pc but that doesn't mean that microsoft and sony's latest consoles support
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mantle or really anything that closely related to it okay so how do you use it
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well i mean have you ever had a game that supports both directx and opengl
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rendering paths it'll have a drop down menu allowing you to choose the render
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path you want mantle aims to be that simple select
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which API you want to use fire up your game and enjoy the performance advantage
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alright sounds great but hold on i've got a mantle supported game and the drop
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down isn't there well every aspect of your system needs to support mantle you
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will need a mantle compatible video card and mantel compatible driver to go along
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with your mantle compatible game alright so i need an AMD graphics card for now
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yes but AMD says it's designed mantle in
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such a way that makes it applicable to a
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range of modern GPU architectures so while it is a proprietary technology
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right now AMD says they're planning to release mantle as an open specification
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sometime in 2014 so stay tuned on that one
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all right so why did AMD do all this work on their own rather than improve
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what was already there and that is a great question and one that i'm actually
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just gonna leave it to AMD dancer from their faq the design of mental was
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driven by feedback from leading game developers who preferred the idea of a
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fresh start with a new API to the extension and patching of existing ones
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okay but what does that mean for directx and opengl
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in reality for now nothing mantle is in its infancy and the industry could still
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kind of tinker with it for a while and then leave it abandoned in a corner but
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if instead the industry adopts it wholeheartedly or even just borrows
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certain aspects of it and applies them to improving directx and opengl AMD
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figures they can call the project a success so all right which leads us to the meat
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of it you sat through the video how much of a performance improvement is there
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with mantle and i'm sorry to disappoint you but unfortunately there's just too wide a
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range to give you a straight up single answer different pc configurations will
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behave in different ways but the general rule is that mantle will have the
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biggest impact in CPU limited scenarios
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particularly because of how much more efficiently it allows a game engine to
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utilize a multi-core processor speaking
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of multi-core processors hotspot shield whether you need to make yourself a bit
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more difficult to track on your multi-core desktop pc or whether you
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need to leverage the mobile data saving services that are available on iOS
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devices when you're on the go hotspot shield is the fast simple way to improve
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your security online that was a terrible segue but my point still stands and
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there's great news you can get a free trial of their elite service at any time
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and if you use offer code Linus you can save 20 when it's time to take the
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plunge so check out the link in the video description to give it a shot like
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this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment under
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the video and let me know your thoughts on mantle i mean by the time you're
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watching this video it could be a a year later in the landscape could have
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completely changed so i'd love to keep the discussion up to date and as always
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guys don't forget to subscribe to techwiki for more fastest possible
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