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Sparky83's avatar
Sparky83
Honored Guest
11 years ago

What about AMD Mantle? Is it useful?

Hello there,

I am currently thinking about which type of graphics card I am going to buy in a few months (maybe in october). If I had to choose right now, I would pick a nvidia GeForce GTX 780 because of the reliability. It seems that the Radeon R9 290 has some issues with temperature and is quite loud.

But then there is Mantle, the new API from AMD. I didn't read much about it, but I heard some people say that it would be nice with Battlefield 4 and brings a lot more frames per second. I am not really sure, if I can believe this, because today I read an article in a german computermagazine called CT (like in Computer Technology), which is one of the few respected magazines with good reputation, in which they stated that most of the time Mantle doesn't bring you any benefit. Unless you have a poor CPU and 3D-scenes that rely on CPU-power.

And then there is this table from another article of the same issue of CT:

With the Radeon R9 290X there is just a minimal gain of one single frame...
With Radeon R9 270 the performance is even worse! :?
What might be the reason?

So what did you experience with Mantle and what do you know about it? Will it get better in the future or is it just nice for multiplatform gaming? (Linux)

12 Replies

  • Peejle's avatar
    Peejle
    Explorer
    11 years ago
    If your purchase date is October you're 4 1/2 months too early to do any planning.
    You can't get ahead of the (untested generally, let alone with the Rift) curve.

    Peejle
  • Sparky83's avatar
    Sparky83
    Honored Guest
    11 years ago
    I wouldn't doubt that. I am just trying to get into the topic. I can't see into the future, so I will have to work with what is there right now. I haven't been looking too much into graphics cards because the good ones were typically too expensive for me to even be considered. It was just no fun.

    So the question still is if there is anyone here who experienced the effects of using Mantle. Surely Mantle will be evolving too, but is it likely that future AMD cards will get more out of it so that it might be better to get AMD instead of nVidia?
  • Hadwell's avatar
    Hadwell
    Honored Guest
    11 years ago
    Mantle isn't very useful... when only 3 or 4 games use it, unless those couple of games are the only ones you play...

    the problem with Mantle is its a closed API, their cutting off the largest segment of the videocard market, since most people use nvidia...http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/30dayshare.html so i really doubt developers are going to rely on it for much...

    nvidia on the other hand has wicked awesome drivers, working to make their cards faster under DirectX, that's far more useful since every video card from every manufacturer uses it (on PC anyway)

    as for the reason why mantle isn't giving much more performance is because it helps the CPU multitask better, so if the CPU isn't the bottleneck without Mantle then it won't improve performance with it...

    the fastest single gpu card you can get is the 780ti... it's also cooler and quieter, overclocks like a beast, and like i said, has better, more frequently updated drivers.

    if you want the 780, it will get to 780ti stock speeds no problem with overclocking, but not much beyond that...

    and ATI fanboys, don't quote crysis 1 2 or 3, that's the exception, not the rule, because the only rule that's always true is that there is an exception to every rule...
  • Hadwell's avatar
    Hadwell
    Honored Guest
    11 years ago
    no... if i was... i wouldn't be telling you you can make a 780 the same speed as a 780ti

    and i wouldn't be honest about how ati cards can beat nvidia cards in 1 game franchise when their not cpu limited...

    ATI does have one decent card, though its a dual gpu card, their 295x2 is very good, nice and quiet too, its two full 290x's not nerf'd in any way, shape or form... pretty darn awesome, don't know how it compares to two 290xs in crossfire... but with its cooler, its worth it anyway, unless you're already water cooling...

    but for single gpu cards, theres still nothing better than the 780ti....

    don't expect much better from ati or nvidia for a while... and if nvidia releases the 800 series, and their faster, not just more efficient, then i don't really see ati catching up...

    ati has also gone as far as to say no 20nm chips for 2014... but i don't know about nvidia... probly their going to focus on their tegra stuff...
  • dwood15's avatar
    dwood15
    Protege
    11 years ago
    What you fail to mention, however, is that AMD's price/performance beats nVidia on almost every card out there.
  • Hadwell's avatar
    Hadwell
    Honored Guest
    11 years ago
    "dwood15" wrote:
    What you fail to mention, however, is that AMD's price/performance beats nVidia on almost every card out there.


    something being cheaper doesn't make it better, so i don't mention price...

    you want the best, you pay the premium... no compromise

    there was a tech syndicate pizza analogy...

    "i'd rather pay more per piece of pepperoni on my pizza, if it meant I got more pepperoni." that's the nvidia analogy...

    "i'd rather pay less per piece of pepperoni on my pizza, even if it meant i got less pepperoni." thats the ati analogy....
  • Sparky83's avatar
    Sparky83
    Honored Guest
    11 years ago
    I don't care about pepperoni. :D

    It doesn't really matter for me if it is AMD or nVidia. I had the nVidia GeForce 4 MX 440, then I had a ATI Radeon X800. After that I had the ATI Radeon HD 5650M in my laptop. I don't really care if the next card I use is from one or the other. I only care about specs. If it is not necessarily the price ( and it isn't ), then the most important things after graphics quality are for me:
    - power consumption (also in relation to graphics quality)
    - noise level
    - cooling

    So when in half a year there is any manufacturer that produces good hardware with AMD GPU regarding these aspects, then I will surely buy it. If I feel that nVidia has better quality and the price doesn't hurt too much, then it will be them.

    Still I can't really get an idea if Mantle could make a difference. I would rather doubt it now, but it seems to be too early to tell.
  • raidho36's avatar
    raidho36
    Explorer
    11 years ago
    AMD Mantle is extremely useful, if employed properly, which isn't the case with modern AAA titles such as BF. One of the biggest reasons behind it is that there's no DX alternative to it so it doesn't worth the effort just to please AMD users, so they don't try too hard. The other big reason is little programmers education level on Mantle usage.

    NVidia cards are actually having quite a bit worse hardware than AMD cards, it's just extremely optimized 3d driver that makes them competitive. On computational tasks, AMD beats NVidia flat out, and Mantle removes CPU data bus bottleneck even though increasing a bit GPU load. When we would come to raytracing rendering (which I beleive will happen eventually) 3d performance wouldn't matter, only plain number grinding capabilities, the FLOPS, would measure card's horsepower.