Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Xbox One will not support AMD Mantle
AMD recently announced "Mantle", their low level API for consoles. They also announced that Mantle would be available for PCs on AMD's GCN cards (Radeon HD 7000 series and later). The idea was that this would make it easy to port console games to PCs while heavily optimized for AMD's GCN architecture--as opposed to competing architectures from Nvidia.
Now Microsoft has announced that the Xbox One will not support Mantle, but only a superset of DirectX 11.2. When the entire point of Mantle is that console games need to be written for it, that's a major blow to AMD's hopes of using it for world domination. Even so, I can understand why Microsoft did this: a game that uses Mantle might be too easily ported to Linux. Microsoft wants console ports using DirectX right from the start, so that porting them to Windows is easy and anything else is hard.
Even so, Microsoft ought to be careful that they don't kill off the Xbox One with decisions like this and a whole host of others before it. The PS4 already has much more powerful hardware than the Xbox One, while being much cheaper. If the PS4 supports AMD's low level API to extract maximum performance from their hardware and the Xbox One doesn't, that could exacerbate the Xbox One's hardware disadvantage.
Comments
No surprise there, they want to keep everyone on the DirectX API. I have no doubt, that in the very off chance that Mantle does actually take off, they will relent and allow it - but it's a very small chance at that.
Microslop really has become the Institute of 'not' haven't they.
I have zero interest in Xbox one and any exclusive game on that platform.
but that is just me.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
I would say that Mantle even with Microsoft's support won't take off, this just solidifies it. Some companies may use it for maximum performance on strictly a few systems, but like anything that relies on certain hardware being present it has very little chance at getting widespread adoption.
NVidia still has a large portion of the PC market which is the highest grossing gaming sector, so as a developer it would be rather dumb to not support it. This also only works on GCN iterations which have only been around for a couple years. To me this makes it an unappealing venture on the PC as games typically need to be written for hardware 4 years old.
I think it will soon be the time for OpenGL. For a developer DirectX has had a clear advantage in performance. No other setup could really compete on multiple fronts. That gap is now pretty much closed with OpenGL. There is also the complete package with OpenCL, and OpenAL. OpenCL tends to perform better than DirectCompute, and OpenAL is competitive with XAudio2. You also don't have to worry about Microsoft quirks like learning a myriad of apis that change every couple years.
Nope..i'm with you on this. ^^
This seems like the typical Microsoft monopoly-pushing. They want everyone using their product and they don't want their product to be compatible with anyone else. By doing so, they are likely trying to prevent SteamOS from taking off. What they don't realize is that SteamOS will likely be ran on dual-boot systems for the first few years to see if game developers are likely to support it. Depending on how that battle plays out, Microsoft could easily lose the PC gaming market, and their consoles will also lose support due to being difficult to port games to other consoles and PC.
Consoles slowly merging with PC hardware and software, and any move against that is like shooting yourself in the foot. Eventually, consoles and PCs will all use the same game disks and your choice of console or PC will revolve around the other features you want, like the social networks that come with consoles.
It's not like Nvidia is a bit player in the PC market. If a developer supports Mantle, what do they do about machines that run Nvidia cards? If half the PCs out there run Nvidia cards, or even 30% of the machines run Nvidia hardware, and their games run like @ss on Nvidia hardware, there's not a lot of incentive to use Mantle, especially if they have experience writing their own stuff.
Using it to get better performance on AMD hardware might make sense, but using it to port from consoles to PCs or Linux may not. It might make porting worse when the platform has Nvidia hardware, or unsupported AMD hardware. Developers will be stuck with the same issues as they had before. It might make more sense for them to roll their own tools and libraries.
**
I'm sure Microsoft doesn't want to support anything that could potentially push people away from their ecosystem, but they may not see any advantage in using Mantle in terms of work saved since they seem to be capable of writing their own libraries for the systems they want to support.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
A developer could write both Mantle and OpenGL or DirectX code paths. The word "both" there should explain why they won't, however.
Note also that Mantle is only supported by AMD Radeon HD 7000 series and later video cards. Even Radeon HD 5000 and 6000 cards, which aren't that old, don't support Mantle.
What I think AMD was really hoping for is that if developers have Mantle code already written for a console game, they could just reuse that code when porting to PC in addition to writing separate code for everything else, and then the Mantle code would make AMD's latest video cards look artificially better in reviews. That may still happen in a few games with PS4 ports, but I don't think it's going to be prevalent.
And what if the PS4 doesn't support Mantle either?
http://community.amd.com/community/amd-blogs/amd-gaming/blog/2013/10/17/the-four-core-principles-of-amd-s-mantle
"the initial iteration of Mantle is intended specifically for PCs"
If you don't even get Mantle support from a straight console port, why build it into the game in the first place? Yes, Mantle can improve performance on GCN cards. A separate API for every video card architecture ever made can improve performance on every architecture. But that massively increases the cost to create the game and would be a nightmare to maintain. DirectX and OpenGL exist precisely to avoid that scenario.
Maybe something like Mantle could have some use after Moore's Law has been dead for a long time and there are only a few GPU architectures that people still use much. Maybe. If that ever happens. But in the near future? It's nothing more than a marketing gimmick, a way to look good in a few sponsored games, and a talking point for fanboys. Just like GPU PhysX.
Mantle on other hand can also alinate nvidia and intel so its still very unclear if it benefits AMD or whole gameing scene, future will tell offcorse(GLIDE debacle repeating it self from 90s?)
Im btw a AMD fan but not blind im still not convinced this whole mantle is any good overall.
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77
CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k
GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now))
MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB
PSU:Corsair AX1200i
OS:Windows 10 64bit
And me three...
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77
CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k
GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now))
MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB
PSU:Corsair AX1200i
OS:Windows 10 64bit
Majority of consumers dont know shit what is mantle or even that there is a AMD gpu inside they just want a xbox so they can show there friends there lastest console shit games:P
They dont visit forums or read any of this shit where talking about here hehe.
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77
CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k
GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now))
MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB
PSU:Corsair AX1200i
OS:Windows 10 64bit
Only way Mantle can have maybe some succes is if battlefield 4 performs from midrange to highend pc's alot better the MS DirectX 11.2 other wise its DOA.
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77
CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k
GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now))
MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB
PSU:Corsair AX1200i
OS:Windows 10 64bit
It would take a lot more than just one game to move the industry. Even if BF4 runs amazingly well on Mantle, it may sell a few more AMD cards for some diehard BF4 gamers, but it still won't convince other developers to shift toward developing for Mantle unless there can be some incontrovertible evidence that because of Mantle support EA sold many more copies of BF4 such that offset the additional cost of development - and that just isn't likely to happen.
Odds are very high that AMD paid EA to develop a Mantle client for BF4 for marketing purposes. AMD may pay for a few other high-profile projects to try to get some critical mass, but it won't pay every developer out there to do it.
Just like nVidia's PhysX, you see a few high profile titles with it, where nVidia went out and paid the developers to use it, and then it pretty well gets ignored everywhere else because it has limited support (requires nVidia hardware) and it doesn't help sell software; it just sells video cards.
The only feather AMD had in it's cap with this was GCN being on both consoles, meaning that a developer could use Mantle instead of whatever proprietary API each console had and make it easier to cross-platform for consoles. Then that would transfer over to PC's with AMD cards fairly easily, they would just need a DirectX wrapper to cover for non-AMD PC's. Without console support from both major vendors, though, it's pretty well dead in the water.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/Cloudsol/
Currently playing: GW2
Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
I think thats an overlooked point, Mantle isnt for consoles, what Mantle does, is make it easier to port a game from console to PC, the only question really, is whether Nvidia gets on board, if they do, then it could make Mantle the default for PC's, and not Direct X, and while that doesnt immediately affect the Xbone, what it would mean is that the Xbone is likely to suffer from future development, it would focus game developers more on the PS4 and consequently, the PC at the Xbones expense, because to get things to work on the Xbone, they would have to develop for direct x, which would not be the case for both the PS4 and the PC.
Whether Microsoft supports this API is irrelevant, whether Nvidia does however, is extremely relevant.
I already made the decision to avoid xbox one and this just solidifies that choice. To be honest, the only reason I purchase windows is that I am a student and that makes it cheap. Microsoft is becoming more and more like apple every day. I know that this will sound contradictory since mantle is proprietary as well, but in my opinion we need an OS that is much more open source to smash Microsofts lock on the market. Hopefully mantle and steam will help Linux gain ground.
Linux being free is just icing on the cake and to be honest if any flavor of linux could play a majority of mainstream games as well as having a productivity suite that plays well with Office, I would abandon windows in a heartbeat. I would even go so far as to pay for this version of Linux if it was priced competitively. I already play around with rhel, have a raspberry pi, and have an android phone. It shouldnt be to hard to cut ties with windows and everything microsoft develops in the future.
That being said I probably wont buy a ps4 either.
If mantle opens doors to other OS's then mantle might catch on. Microsoft has a lock on PC gaming. Now imagine if linux, which is freeware, can play a majority of the PC games released due to easy porting due to mantle. Imagine if PS4 takes off and games are easily ported to PC due to mantle.
I believe that you are underestimating mantle.
Well first of all,i doubt Microsoft can shoot themselves in the foot anymore than they already have,i know i hate consoles but if i were to support them,i would support the PS4.
Another point is that Microsoft already announced it would no longer advance the Direct x libraries,so sooner or later they will become obsolete.
Playstation used to own the market in the past,then Microsoft got real lucky to bounce back ,especially since they gave a fake speech about thinking of getting out of the console market.If i were Soe i might think about a new strategy,one long the lines of the old days,create a new platform soley for Playstation and alienate other consoles with their exclusive games.They would no longer need to bow down to Microsoft and not have to pay them any licensing and i am positive the playstation would do just as well,maybe even kill off the Xbox with superior games.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
If a game has to use one API that is not Mantle on consoles, and has to use a different API that is also not Mantle on PC, then how exactly does Mantle make it easier to convert from one to the other? Mantle would be a third API to program for (or a fourth, if we're counting Xbox One and PS4 separately).
As for Nvidia, why should Nvidia support Mantle? It's built for AMD's GCN architecture, and AMD will have an advantage in anything coded for Mantle. Why wouldn't Nvidia want to kill that outright? Nvidia is about as likely to support Mantle as AMD is to support CUDA.
Besides, even AMD doesn't support Mantle well enough to make it a viable PC API. Mantle is for AMD's GCN cards only, and not for Radeon HD 5000 or 6000 series cards, let alone older generation cards that don't support the latest relevant versions of DirectX and OpenGL.
If you want an alternative API to DirectX that is already supported by both AMD and Nvidia, there already is one: OpenGL. As a bonus, it's even supported (in some products) by Intel and Imagination. Apple supports it for Mac OS X, albeit not for iOS. Whatever industry support problems OpenGL may have, Mantle would surely have a far greater dose of them.
If Mantle brings good capabilities that OpenGL and DirectX lack, then the solution is to get them implemented into the OpenGL and/or DirectX standards, not to create some new API from scratch. Indeed, AMD is already going this route, writing extensions for OpenGL that will offer the capabilities of Mantle.
While OpenGL extensions tend not to get used while they are extensions because of spotty hardware support (except for anisotropic filtering, which would have been added to the core specification years ago if not for proprietary IP), many things that are added to the core specification got their start as extensions. In some cases, multiple hardware vendors would make their own extensions, which eventually got combined into a single thing added to the core specfication.
Whatever OpenGL extensions AMD writes today won't get used much today, but they might someday be part of OpenGL 4.6 or 5.0 or whatever if they're not too reliant on peculiar details specific to AMD's GCN architecture. And then Mantle will officially have no point whatsoever.
You know what opens doors to other OSes? OpenGL. Various versions of it or its subset, OpenGL ES, are supported on many different versions of Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Android, iOS, BlackBerry OS, Symbian, Solaris, FreeBSD, HP-UX, and probably others.
It seems the majority of games are created for PC or consoles. Which console supports OpenGL?
If a developer creates a game for PS4 and then ports it to PC using lets say steam, which would be more efficient, opengl or mantle? Isnt the entire purpose of mantle is to make it less time consuming to port a console game to the PC as well as allowing the developer direct access to the hardware? Would developing a console game and then porting it to PC using opengl be as cost effective and would it provide the same or superior performance?
It seems to me that Microsoft is using directx to force the market in its direction by having direct x on their console and windows platforms. It also seems greedy for Microsoft to limit directx 11.2 to windows 8.1 forcing the consumer to upgrade from win 7 for no apparent reason.
The reason for DirectX to exist is to try to get people to buy Windows. But the only meaningful feature supported by DirectX 11.2 but not DirectX 11 (which Windows 7 does support) is stereoscopic 3D, and even that isn't a big deal.
If you port a game to PC using Mantle but not also using something else for hardware that doesn't support Mantle, then you end up with a game that can only run on Radeon HD 7000 series and later video cards--meaning, it flatly will not run at all on Nvidia hardware, or even Radeon HD 6000 series or earlier cards.
Unless you're willing to go that route, it's a question of whether it's easier to write code for both Mantle and something else or only the something else. The answer should be pretty obvious: if you want to code for Mantle also, then you do all of the work that you'd do without it, plus some additional work for Mantle.
If you want to make a game that works on multiple operating systems (excluding console), then using OpenGL will make things a lot easier for you, because you can have essentially the same code run everywhere rather than having to maintain multiple completely independent code paths. It's basically the difference between writing a program in C++ that works with two different C++ compilers, versus writing a program in C++ and another program in Java that works identically to the C++ program. (If you haven't done computer graphics, that's likely a closer analogy than you think, as getting a game to run on a variety of different video cards is largely a matter of getting it to work with the compilers built into various video drivers.)
Or, if you're not a programmer, it's the difference between having British English and American English versions of the same book, versus having English and Russian language versions of the same book. The former is just some minor tweaks for spelling and idioms, while the latter is a vastly larger project.
But that, of course, assumes that game designers want their game to run on multiple operating systems. Most PC games are Windows-only, without caring much whether it works on other operating systems. That's what allows DirectX to be so prevalent.
OpenGL ES 1.0 added an official 3D graphics API to the Android[9] and Symbian[10] operating systems, as well as by QNX[11] It is also supported by the PlayStation 3 as one of its official graphics APIs[12] (the other one being low level libgcm library) with Nvidia's Cg in lieu of GLSL.[13] The PlayStation 3 also includes several features of the 2.0 version of OpenGL ES.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL_ES#cite_note-5
PS4 will also use OpenGL, although I'm not sure about which standard.
Nintendo also uses a non-standard version of OpenGL, depending on which devices your talking about.