The Wait is Over. AMD has finally launched Mantle in Beta. However it turns out that Mantle is not about increasing GPU Performance at all, its about helping out Low-End CPUs.
Low level refers to abstraction layers of hardware (the 'bare metal' term that gets thrown around here is one of these 'layers'). Low level is not a term for low end hardware.
Mantle has always been referred to as a lower level API than Direct X or OpenGL.
That is true but it was also said that this was more developed for lower end hardware and it reached low level API to achieve that. It does improve performance all around for higher end stuff but I believe the goal of this was for lower level tech from everything I read initially. I think people just got caught up in the hype of it all, but I do believe this will be quite beneficial still.
Please keep in mind that Mantle has just come out and it will take some time before it starts to mature. Already we're seeing benefits all around in regards to CPU and GPU performance.
While GPUs only have a slight boost, they also benefit from Mantle by having smoother framerates. Take a look at this article.
At least now people won't have to worry about getting the absolute cutting edge CPU to run the latest games properly (as long as it supports Mantle of course).
The headline is misleading, firstly the author makes it sound like this driver update is targeted toward CPUs when it's for GPUs. Secondly, even if that were true, this is NOT specific to low-end CPUs, it affects ALL CPUs.
For example, there is an article (and others) that show one of the Extreme i7 CPUs paired with 2 x R9 290X's and going from DX to Mantle increased the Framerate by 55% (around that). Not only that, but another article showed that the FPS was much more smooth as it wasn't dipping that much.
So while on the GPU side there was only slight improvements, the overall experience has also gotten smoother and Mantle is only in its infancy.
Good links, and it bodes well for Mantle, when developers actually use it.
On the flip side, these are closed test, and won't represent real world results, but even if it's somewhere in between the low results from this article, or the high results from the BF4 link, Mantle is still making an improvement which is always welcome.
Realistically we should be expecting performance boost of around 20% - 30%, which is what AMD said to expect.
Can't disagree with you there, I guess I'm just being a little optimistic haha. This definitely shows promise for it though given its functionality.
If it really does show benefit in real world tests, then I think the only hard part from there will be for it to catch on. At least other developers besides DICE are starting to show support. The games that support Mantle so far are...
Thief Star Citizen Battlefield 4 and StarSwarm (though not a game)
Yeah, mantle is for all cpu's that are a bottleneck for the system. In the case of the 290X crossfired, those cards are very powerful alone so if you have two of them even with a powerfull CPU you are still bottlenecked by your CPU. Mantle relieves this bottleneck by making more efficient use of your CPU.
I wish Nvidia did something like this, I'm sure my original i7 920 is my bottleneck as my GPU is an GTX760.
I can run battlefield 4 on ultra but big fights will drop me down a bit.
And I'm In no mood to tear my pc apart and throw in a new Mobo, RAM, and a new i7. I'd be building a new rig at this point, So I'll just wait it out until I can't even do medium anymore, lol.
ah yes the dirty little hidden problem with Intels.
Upgrading them requires you to basically build a new PC as you gotta buy a new mobo, CPU, and Ram.
May I suggest you buy a water cooler and overclock that core i7 920 to 3.5ghz as that should boost your performance and hold you over for another year or two.
also you may want to have 8GB of the fastest ram possible.
Core i7 920 are not dead just yet as a nice overclock to 3.5ghz will boost your performance a lot.
No article ...
Thx buddy
"9x more draw calls"...
..."however if you already have a good cpu but a low end gpu, or a good cpu and a high end gpu, Mantle won’t affect performance alot."
You would think they would have mentioned that before they went into marketing buzzword mode.
Well this is a disappointment. I wonder if this will set back the xbox360 emulation project that was posted on n4g lately. Anyone know?
So you get a "big" under 10% improvement if you aren't a total retard and match your hardware properly.