Computex TAIPEI 2014 - AMD Showcases Performance Difference Between DirectX & Mantle

During Computex TAIPEI 2014, AMD showed off the performance difference between Microsoft's DirectX and Mantle, and today the red team released a video from it.

[TurboGamer]

Exactly how much did AMD pay those devs to gimp the DirectX version of the Game? I would have believed them if there was a 5-10fps difference, but a 50fps difference is just BS at the highest level.

[Kayant]

Nothing. It's a controlled benchmark so they can use hardware and settings that show the most benefit with mantle. It's not BS it's just very skewered to show such a big difference.

http://www.extremetech.com/...
http://hothardware.com/News...

http://hothardware.com/news...
http://www.extremetech.com/...

[Lon3wolf]

oops wrong reply

[LordDhampire]

TurboGamer, Mantle takes the strain off the CPU and puts it on the GPU, a game like star swarm with tons of small particles and ships like that use a ton of CPU power, crippling even the strongest processors, hench why mantle shines.

[AndrewLB]

And Mantle only has any benefit if your CPU is a POS from 5 years ago. Any $120 modern CPU will see only a few FPS in actual games. Mantle's main benefit is to Netbooks and systems with APU's. And truth be told, no AMD APU is going to play the newest games on ultra and when you think about it, AMD has far less discrete graphics market share then nVidia so why would developers use mantle other than for the fact that they're being paid a LOT.

[PCpower]

WRONG! Any i7 series from Intel will not have any issues with poorly optimized DirectX. This slowdown only affects weak processors like i5's or all of AMD's processors. Raw power is raw power. In fact with Mantle enabled, barely any performance gain is noticed on high end CPU's. That is because of the law of diminishing returns. This law cannot be violated or then science will be turned on its head. The more powerful something is, the less it is affected by optimizations or affected from poor optimizations.

[Lon3wolf]

@AndrewLB

That demo ran on 8350's.

[Volkama]

Andrew that is a common misconception. Mantle definitely has it's place for the high-end.

I have an i7-3820 clocked at 4.4ghz, and 2x R9-290s. Using BF4 as the best example about, I get about 100fps with Dx and ~160fps with mantle. That's a huge increase, and a real world example.

I actually use mostly Dx though, and only play with mantle if I'm messing around with 4k res. The extra frames do nothing for me besides make my graphics cards run about 10degrees hotter.

@PCPower the fact that you say any i7 can run bad Dx code and any i5 cannot only proves you are making it up. It is exceptionally rare to see Dx run significantly better on an i7 than an i5, as it simply doesn't use the extra vcores.

[Dehnus]

@PCpower:
Calling an I5 a weak Processor is really showing what kind of idiot you are. The top line I5's are every bit as potent as the I7 with the only difference being HyperThreading. Say you own a 3570 or 4570, of any form, they'll be getting the same benchmark as their I7 bigger brohter 3770 or 4770. The only difference usually being Hyper threading. So really calling an I5 weak is just marketing mumbo jumbo from your local PC salesman, that I5 will do you just fine.

[LordDhampire]

WRONG! PCpower you are a fool, mantle hardly helps in BF4 because its not a CPU intensive game, but for a game with alot of particles and physyx then yes its going to strain a CPU alot even a i7 which I own, honestly my i7 is the only limiting factor in my pc because cpu's are so far behind gpu's.

[Magicite]

DX is a cumbersome dinosaur. I hope there will be more APIs like Mantle soon.

[awi5951]

Unlike nividia amd doesnt gimp direct x to kill performance on other platforms. Mantle is a slider you turn on to use it just like in BF4. You can choose to use mantle or use direct x. It doesnt gimp direct x like Nivida does to amd.

Amd gives the player the choice to use it or not to, your game will run fine on both if your hardware can handle it. But nividia's way if your hardware can over power the game nividias gameworks will throttle your graphics card so it cant take advantage if it.
And there isnt anyway for them to fix it either because developers say nividia wont let them fix their own game to run better on AMD because it would violate nividas gameworks agreement.

[Cyb3r]

Is Mantle compatible with newgen consoles? (sorry if this is a dumb question)

[Kayant]

It's not be AMD says it can however it's not needed as both API's in PS4 and XB1 have the same benefits. Remember mantle is meant to bring "console efficiency to PC" in the same lines DX12 is bringing it to PC/Mobile.

XB1 has a low level API already called DX11.X -
http://www.neogaf.com/forum...
" Under the hood, Forza achieves this by using the efficient low-level APIs already available on Xbox One today. Traditionally this level of efficiency was only available on console – now, Direct3D 12, even in an alpha state, brings this efficiency to PC and Phone as well."
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dir...

PS4 has one called GNM -

"At the lowest level there's an API called GNM. That gives you nearly full control of the GPU. It gives you a lot of potential power and flexibility on how you program things. Driving the GPU at that level means more work."
http://www.eurogamer.net/ar...
http://www.eurogamer.net/ar...

[HighResHero]

Mantle will have the most benefit on PCs. The new consoles have their own highly optimized, evolving APIs/Dev Kits. Considering AMD's collaboration with Sony(and MS talk of DX) one might assume that some of the Mantle technology will be present in the PS4 kits, but once again, Mantle is mostly to help get the most out of PCs. Some tech will be shared by both console's APIs though of course.
People are talking a lot about DX12(some possibly in response to AMD), which will also have more benefits on PCs, since they need way more help in terms of optimization. We will probably find out if it has any real world benefit for the XB or if they are just trying to create hype. Excuse the half asleep response.

(HAha, late response. Looks like Kayant took care of some links for you)

[PCpower]

Correction: Benefits PC's that have weak processors. You can look up the DirectX vs Mantle benchmarks and see that i7 processors gain very little performance with Mantle. All Mantle will do is give boost to weak processors to those who could not afford a $500 CPU. This will help gain them abilities to play games at better settings without needing a $500 CPU. So it will save on money mainly.

[darksky]

Since XB1 will already be optimized with this king of technology I'm assuming MS will have gained alot of knowledge of Mantle to use in DX12.
If DX12 can match mantle or surpass it then it's a win for consumers thanks to AMD.

[Cyb3r]

Thanks

[ChickeyCantor]

In all honesty, that demo did no look that complex. So what exactly caused DX to run so slow?

Seems like a biased move here.

[Pandamobile]

There are tens of thousands of GPU-controlled ships flying around and killing each other.

Mantle, DX12 and the like are supposed to remove most of the CPU overhead from the rendering pipeline, which allows developers to have a much higher level of control over what parts of the computer handle what tasks.

This case shows how much of an impact the CPU overhead can have on a game.

[ChickeyCantor]

I know what mantle does. Modern CPU's don't have issues controlling thousands of ships. that's not what this is about.

GPUs can easily render that which you see. The extreme framedrops are just biased. You can't tell me they used proper software. That what they demonstrated shouldn't be hard to handle.

[PCpower]

This demo shows how weak processors struggle and will need Mantle. If it was an i7 then it would not struggle with the DirectX version.

http://www.techspot.com/rev...

Also, keep in mind that once you start to go above 1080P, then the GPU will start to become the bottleneck instead of the CPU. So Mantle will have no benefit at higher resolutions since the GPU will be maxed out to its fullest ability under DirectX or Mantle. So no gains.

[ChickeyCantor]

@PCpower

1080p is not a bottleneck on mid/high-end GPU's these days. So a low level api still has its benefits there.

Without mantle the frame rates would probably be even lower. A lower API is always good. I just don't understand the extreme framedrop from the demo. It just seems like pure PR talk.

[PCpower]

@ChickeyCantor

Hence, the reason I said above 1080P.

[darksky]

@ ChickyCantor,

If Modern CPU's could match GPU's then why do the cpu tests in 3Dmark run like sh*t?

[ChickeyCantor]

"If Modern CPU's could match GPU's then why do the cpu tests in 3Dmark run like sh*t?"

What the bloody hell?
No one insinuated that.

If that's the test is CPU vs GPU then AMD people aren't making a case here.

[kingduqc]

tlou has like 5-10 enemies on screen, this has 5000-10 000 i think it's fairly complex for the cpu..

[ChickeyCantor]

Why did you even bother mention tlou? A moden CPU should be able to handle 5000-10000 enities, provided the code be written efficient.
Which btw still has nothing to do with mantle or directX.

[AnEwGuY]

Have your fun while you can, AMD... DX12 is coming.

[MrUnfamiler]

You say that like DX12 is godzilla & Mantle is Tokyo.

Anyways all DX12 is going to help is windows 8.1 users, wich aint very many on the grand scheme of things. If my choice is get 8.1 with DX12 or Keep 7 with mantle, it seems like a no-brainer.

[elhebbo16]

I wanna see what DX12 brings to the table.

[awi5951]

Probably nothing microsoft will probably just bribe developers to leave out certain graphics effects to make people upgrade. But just like direct x10 in vista people will find a hack to make those graphics effects work on direct x11 and prove microsoft is full of (^&(^*

[elhebbo16]

DX12 is supposed to make DX as a whole take in less overhead and be more efficient with 'to the metal' coding like mantle. Mantle might be great for AMD, but for us folks who have nvidia cards DX12 is highly anticipated.

[Avenger411]

I feel like people are "praying for their own church". People who have nvidia hardware tends to hate on amd and vice versa. BUT! I think for all of us (green team or red team) it is good! It's bringing competition hence we benefit from it. I think the test reallly shows what mantle can bring to the table but compared to what? Let's wait up and see what DX12 can give us in terms of raw performance upgrade (cpu to gpu task transfer) and then we could compare! We even might end up being astonished by dx12 performances that mantle will become useless .. Or the other way around ;D. As for me i'm a green team mofo and i like to see competition from red team!

BRING IT ONNN AMD :D

[lfc_4eva]

Ok I believe that mantle will have a significant boost over dx11. Kind of why MS is really pushing dx12 for next year.

I want to know how mantle compares with dx12. Plus can they both work together? Can mantle provide a huge boost for the gpu, while dx12 makes sure the cpu especially, is not bogged down?

[lazyboyblue]

I'm currently planning to jump back into PC gaming but I really don't know whether to go nvidia or amd.on one hand there's Amd who I really like as a company. They make good fast cards and give us things like Mantle and make available to everyone. Nvidia on the other hand squeeze devs to make exclusive effects for nvidia cards in their games and make sure some games don't run smoothly on Amd.

So the question is; do I go with a card I like by a company I respect or do I give in and get an Nvidia for the smoother experience? Arkham knight is just round the corner, its one of my most wanted games and its bound to be gimped on Amd cards (going by past Arkham games).

[lfc_4eva]

Nvidia dude all the way.

[Maxor]

And how many Mantle games are there? Yeah...I thought so. AMD is the king of half baked and poorly supported tech, most of their features have little to no support and until they can prove that Mantle is actually a thing Direct X will continue to dominate.

Oh yeah how many games take advantage of the R290X on board sound processing? That's right, crickets.

[Avenger411]

Loll cricketss its funny ;)

[ATi_Elite]

.........and in the end Mantle quietly dies in some back hall closet somewhere.

Granted the Low/mid tier APU/GPU performance boost is nice BUT...........

I can go get a intel/nvidia combo that will perform very well across the board on EVERY GAME and not just a slight few Mantle games.

AMD should've used this time to make better CPU's because at the end of the day Hyper Threading still RULES!!!

So go ahead AMD and keep Cherry Picking benchmarks but you are not fooling me and other serious gamers.

[awi5951]

Amd performs just as well on direct x. The only games that it wont perform well is on the damn gameworks games that Nividia has that kills direct x performance on amd cards because Nividia programmed the software that way. Even the watch dogs developers even said they cant fix it because nividia wont let them. Its a trojan horse to kill amd and they will get sued again and lose again like they did before for these cheap tactics.