AMD Mantle update

AMD Mantle er endelig klar  

De havde lovet Mantle klar i Januar men måtte udsætte som vi har skrevet her på siden tidligere, men nu er Mantle klar og en Battlefield 4 patch skulle være klar fra Dice / EA. Der skulle være nogen gevaldige forbedringer for AMD udstyret maskiner, herunder ses de tal vi har fået fra AMD.

Battlefield 4 ( EA-DICE )

• CPU-limited scenario: 40.9% (1080p) and 40.1% (1600p) performance improvement under Ultra settings and 4xAA on the AMD A10-7700K with an AMD Radeon™ R9 290X.
   
• GPU-limited scenario: 2.7% (1080p) and 1.4% (1600p) performance improvement under Ultra settings and FXAA on the Core i7-4960X with an AMD Radeon™ R7 260X
   
• Average uplift for 1080p: 13.28% (Average of 290X and 260X data on the i7-4960X, A10-7700K, FX 8350 and i5-4670K)
   
• Average uplift for 1600p: 11.35% (Average of 290X and 260X data on the i7-4960X, A10-7700K, FX 8350 and i5-4670K)

Her er presse meddelesen fra AMD..

Mantle has been many years in the making by AMD, but we were not alone in this effort! Mantle was also directly shaped by the input we received from the greater game development community that has long sought a low-level graphics API for PCs. We worked shoulder-to-shoulder with developers like DICE and Oxide Games to create Mantle in the image of their needs: a streamlined, robust, efficient API for modern graphics work. In fact, Mantle is the very first API designed directly by game developers for their modern craft!

At the simplest level, Mantle is an Application Programming Interface (API), or a language that game developers can use to write code that creates the beautiful graphics on your screen. In its current iteration, the Mantle API uniquely leverages the hardware in the Graphics Core Next architecture (GCN) of modern AMD Radeon™ GPUs for peak performance.

More broadly, Mantle is functionally similar to DirectX® and OpenGL, but Mantle is different in that it was purpose-built as a lower level API. By “lower level,” it’s meant that the language of Mantle more closely matches the way modern graphics architectures (like AMD’s own GCN) are designed to execute code. The primary benefit of a lower level API is a reduction in software bottlenecks, such as the time a GPU and CPU must spend translating/understanding/reorganizing code on-the-fly before it can be executed and presented to the user as graphics. Mantle comes in contrast to the “high level API,” which offers broader compatibility with multiple GPU architectures, but does so at the expense of lower performance and efficiency.

Before you proceed with performance analysis, however, we wanted to provide some new insight on the design goals of the Mantle API.
DESIGN PRINCIPLES OF MANTLE
First and foremost, Mantle is primarily designed to improve performance in scenarios where the CPU is the limiting factor (so-called “CPU-bound” cases); CPU-bound scenarios are legion in gaming, as existing APIs have heavy validation overhead, along with difficulty scaling out to multiple CPU cores. In addressing this common problem, Mantle enables a pronounced improvement for the majority of global PC gamers that have entry-level and mid-range processors. Some of the techniques to achieve this include:
- Low-overhead validation and processing of API commands
- Explicit command buffer control
- Close to linear performance scaling from recording command buffers onto multiple CPU cores
- Reduced runtime shader compilation overhead

In turn, Mantle makes less of an impact in cases where high resolutions and “maximum detail” settings are used, as these settings are likely to be maximally taxing GPU resources in a manner that is more difficult to improve at the API level (so-called “GPU-bound” scenarios). While Mantle provides some
built-in features to improve GPU-bound performance, gains in these cases are largely dependent on how well Mantle features and optimizations are being utilized by the developer. Some of those features include:
- Reduction of command buffers submissions
- Explicit control of resource compression, expands and synchronizations
- Asynchronous DMA queue for data uploads independent from the graphics engine
- Asynchronous compute queue for overlapping of compute and graphics workloads
- Data formats optimizations via flexible buffer/image access
- Advanced Anti-Aliasing features for MSAA/EQAA optimizations

It’s also prudent to note that Mantle is still in the beta phase and may not reflect the full performance we might be able to achieve through the optimization time we’ll be investing in the months ahead. And, as developers are still familiarizing themselves with Mantle and its relationship to Graphics Core Next, they may not have capitalized on all available opportunities for optimizations—but that will come with time.
One such optimization is the approach to multi-GPU performance scaling, which now rests in the hands of the game developer in the Mantle ecosystem. Developer control of multi-GPU performance empowers them to design an optimal multi-GPU codebase that perfectly matches the approach their rendering engine takes to graphics. Battlefield 4 is currently enabled with multi-GPU capabilities on Mantle, but the Oxide Games StarSwarm demo will be enabled with these capabilities in a later build.

Kilde: AMD