Hardware Discussion Thread

[AnyOldName3]

AMD have announced they're going to release Mantle, but due to the fact that it offers very low level control of the hardware, it isn't ever going to run on nVidia hardware except via emulation, and then it'll be too slow to beat D3D/OpenGL. Previously, nVidia supposedly offered AMD the ability to use CUDA, but AMD had invested in a rival engine, and so decided that doing something to make PhysX more popular wouldn't be in their best interests. Being much more high level than Mantle, it would have been entirely possible to do, though.

[DatKid20]

(10-08-2013, 07:05 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: AMD have announced they're going to release Mantle, but due to the fact that it offers very low level control of the hardware, it isn't ever going to run on nVidia hardware except via emulation, and then it'll be too slow to beat D3D/OpenGL. Previously, nVidia supposedly offered AMD the ability to use CUDA, but AMD had invested in a rival engine, and so decided that doing something to make PhysX more popular wouldn't be in their best interests. Being much more high level than Mantle, it would have been entirely possible to do, though.

Mantle isn't even a really huge thing compared to AMD working to make their Opengl drivers to the point where the only bottleneck will be hardware. Also Mantle isn't meant to beat Opengl considering it's not even compatible with it.

[Garteal]

Kind of in a tough spot. The HD7970 is available for just €249 at Alternate, but with the R9 290, 280, etc right around the corner, I think it's best to just wait it out for now. My 6870 is in desperate need of an upgrade.

[DatKid20]

(10-08-2013, 08:09 AM)Garteal Wrote: Kind of in a tough spot. The HD7970 is available for just €249 at Alternate, but with the R9 290, 280, etc right around the corner, I think it's best to just wait it out for now. My 6870 is in desperate need of an upgrade.

Same here. I wanted a 4670k but Kaveri is very interesting. You should get the r9 280 because it will be newer than the 7970 and driver support will last longer. Plus since it's supposed to be a rebrand (I believe it's a GCN 2.0 7970.) It will have support from the start.

[AnyOldName3]

(10-08-2013, 07:37 AM)DatKid20 Wrote:

(10-08-2013, 07:05 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: AMD have announced they're going to release Mantle, but due to the fact that it offers very low level control of the hardware, it isn't ever going to run on nVidia hardware except via emulation, and then it'll be too slow to beat D3D/OpenGL. Previously, nVidia supposedly offered AMD the ability to use CUDA, but AMD had invested in a rival engine, and so decided that doing something to make PhysX more popular wouldn't be in their best interests. Being much more high level than Mantle, it would have been entirely possible to do, though.

Mantle isn't even a really huge thing compared to AMD working to make their Opengl drivers to the point where the only bottleneck will be hardware. Also Mantle isn't meant to beat Opengl considering it's not even compatible with it.

They're only adding extra extensions to give mantle-like functionality. Programs will have to be rewritten to take advantage of them.

[DatKid20]

(10-08-2013, 08:46 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote:

(10-08-2013, 07:37 AM)DatKid20 Wrote:

(10-08-2013, 07:05 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: AMD have announced they're going to release Mantle, but due to the fact that it offers very low level control of the hardware, it isn't ever going to run on nVidia hardware except via emulation, and then it'll be too slow to beat D3D/OpenGL. Previously, nVidia supposedly offered AMD the ability to use CUDA, but AMD had invested in a rival engine, and so decided that doing something to make PhysX more popular wouldn't be in their best interests. Being much more high level than Mantle, it would have been entirely possible to do, though.

Mantle isn't even a really huge thing compared to AMD working to make their Opengl drivers to the point where the only bottleneck will be hardware. Also Mantle isn't meant to beat Opengl considering it's not even compatible with it.

They're only adding extra extensions to give mantle-like functionality. Programs will have to be rewritten to take advantage of them.

http://www.dsogaming.com/news/amd-aims-to-give-opengl-a-big-boost-api-wont-be-the-bottleneck/


Never said anything about it being equal to mantle. I'm pretty sure that they will improve drivers as just adding extensions won't make all their Opengl problems just disappear.

[AnyOldName3]

the guy who posted the tweets who seems to work for AMD Wrote:We will expose all of the hardware as #OpenGL extensions

This is very similar to how mantle works. It gives lower level access in order to circumvent the problems of abstraction. It gives them an excuse to skip past all of the bits of the drivers that used to do this stuff automatically.

[DatKid20]

(10-08-2013, 10:01 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote:

the guy who posted the tweets who seems to work for AMD Wrote:We will expose all of the hardware as #OpenGL extensions

This is very similar to how mantle works. It gives lower level access in order to circumvent the problems of abstraction. It gives them an excuse to skip past all of the bits of the drivers that used to do this stuff automatically.

Don't forget how they specifically avoided answering whether this was like mantle or not.

[Garteal]

The benchmarks and reviews are here!
Anandtech
Hardware.Info
HardOCP

[AnyOldName3]

I've already read Hexus' review. Their results suggested much better value for money than the GTX 7xx series, which is a problem, because I want a new GPU, and want CUDA for rendering in Blender as it doesn't support OpenCL. Hexus think nVidia will drop their prices, but I don't know how long this will take and how competitive they'll be.

This leaves me not knowing if I'm waiting a couple of weeks, or calling fast rendering an impossibility, or just sending my .blends to a GTX 760 owning friend.