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Items tagged with Mantle
The short life of AMD’s Mantle graphics API is nearly over, thanks to Windows 10 and DirectX 12. AMD announced that developers should begin concentrating on DirectX 12 while promising full support for games that are already heavily invested in Mantle, like EA and Visceral Games’ Battlefield Hardline. The announcement comes as AMD attends the Game Developers Conference (GDC 15) in San Francisco, California. “Proud moments also call for reflection, and today we are especially thoughtful about Mantle’s future,” AMD’s vice president of visual and perceptual computing, Raja Koduri, said in a statement....
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AMD's Future of Compute event was this week and the company has made a number of announcements regarding new technology and the future of its HSA, Mantle, and FreeSync projects. First up, there's Carrizo, AMD's upcoming follow-on to Kaveri and the first chip to use its "Excavator" CPU cores. AMD is projecting that both Carrizo and Carrizo-L will launch in the first half of 2015. Typically, for AMD, that means the May or June timeframe. The company hasn't said much about features or capabilities of these new parts, though its press release does note that Carrizo will support "4K experiences." OpenCL...
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Buried in the details of Microsoft's technical preview for Windows 10 (look for our own discussion in short order), is a bit of a footnote concerning the operating system's requirements. I say footnote because this news -- that Windows 10 will have exactly the same requirements as Windows 8.1, which had the same requirements as Windows 8, which stuck to Windows 7, which was the same as Windows Vista -- is something we take for granted these days. As the years roll by, I can't help wondering what we're actually giving up in exchange for holding the minimum system spec at a single-core 1GHz, 32-bit...
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Crytek -- developers of the CryEngine and the hit Crysis series -- is, by all accounts, in significant trouble. Reports of problems are mounting at multiple publications as employees speak out about missed paychecks, layoffs, and multiple staff departing in the wake of non-payment. Eurogamer is reporting that Crytek UK has laid off or lost 30 staff working on Homefront: The Revolution since development started in 2011, including the Managing Director, Karl Hilton. Crytek, of course, is strenuously denying any and all reports that the company might be near bankruptcy, but comments coming from ex-employees...
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One of the ongoing questions around AMD's Mantle API is how much support it would garner in actual shipping titles. True, EA had committed to adding support to the Frostbite engine, but that's the kind of announcement that can be quietly swept under the rug or might be integrated into the engine but with a minimal number of titles actually using it. So far this year, only Thief and BF4 have shipped with Mantle support -- the former is a minimally regarded game, while the latter has been dogged by play issues that have nothing to do with AMD's API but have distracted from its quality. Three other...
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We've known for several days that EA would unveil a new chapter in the Battlefield universe at E3 2014, but the company has done more than that -- it also launched a surprise beta test for the upcoming Battlefield Hardline. The new game will be an urban cops-and-robbers shootout that drops players into the boots of either side in a more limited form of combat that's likely to focus on closer quarters and tighter objectives than the BF4 maps, some of which are sprawling affairs. The big surprise of E3 was that EA is launching a new closed beta program for PS4 and PC players that you can register...
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One of the hot topics in the wake of Titanfall's launch has been whether or not DirectX 12 would make a difference to the game's sometimes jerky framerate and lower-than-expected 792p resolution. According to Titanfall developer Jon Shirling, the new Microsoft API isn't needed to improve the game's performance, and updates coming down the pipe should improve Xbox One play in the near future. This confirms what we've expected since DX12 was announced -- the API may offer performance improvements in certain scenarios, but DX12 isn't a panacea for the Xbox One's lackluster performance compared to...
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At GDC a few weeks ago, NVIDIA teased a new set of drivers that it promised would offer huge scaling benefits for both single-GPU and SLI configurations. The new driver, 337.50 Beta, drops today -- so what kind of gains can users expect? If you own a high-end NVIDIA card, apparently quite a bit, especially if you game with multiple GPUs in SLI. NVIDIA is predicting some huge jumps for its high-end range with scaling up 50-70% in some cases. These are an impressive set of gains for NVIDIA's top-end cards, particularly the GTX 770, which remains rather more affordable than the top-end GTX 780 Ti....
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We recently had the chance to sit down with some folks at NVIDIA to discuss high performance graphics APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). With all of the noise recently surrounding AMD’s Mantle, DirectX 12, DirectX 11 and even OpenGL, NVIDIA wanted to clear the air somewhat, and explain the company’s position and plans to optimize and support current-gen and future APIs. As you’ve probably surmised in the myriad of discussions regarding Mantle and DirectX 12 recently, API efficiency is extremely important to ensure high performance in a given application. In our talk,...
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One of the most anticipated announcements of GDC this year has been Microsoft's unveiling of DirectX 12. The event today was light on some details, but didn't disappoint -- DirectX 12 looks like a huge step forward for gaming. The problem DX12 wants to solve is the same issue that drove Mantle. DirectX 11 isn't very good at allocating resources efficiently, the API's performance is often choked by single-threaded CPU performance. GPUs are already far faster than CPUs (as shown below), so limiting the graphics card's performance by choking it with a single-threaded CPU is a major problem. What's...
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Earlier this month, Microsoft acknowledged that it would debut DirectX 12 at GDC this year, with promises that it would offer many of the same features as AMD's Mantle. Fast on the heels of that announcement came news that the API would also be deployed on the Xbox One, presumably as part of a future update. Now, a report from SemiAccurate claims that "Microsoft has adopted AMD’s Mantle but are now calling it DX12. The way they did it manages to pull stupidity from the jaws of defeat by breaking compatibility in the name of lock-in." Meanwhile, other reports across the 'Net are claiming that...
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Nvidia may have just announced GameWorks support will be baked into Unreal Engine 4, but the Red Team is firing back with its own announcement today: Upcoming versions of Cryengine will support AMD's Mantle API. Just to be clear, this announcement refers to an upcoming engine that hasn't been used for a shipping title yet -- Cryengine 3, the engine that powered Crysis 3, has been retired in favor of a new-from-the-ground-up approach. The new CryEngine will support the Xbox One, PS4, Wii U, and PC spaces and we're honestly a bit surprised to see Crytek jumping onboard with AMD. I spoke to Crytek...
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Buzz has been building for the last week that Microsoft would soon unveil the next version of DirectX at the upcoming Games Developer Conference (GDC). Microsoft has now confirmed that its discussion forums at the show won't just be to discuss updates to DX11, but that it's putting a full court press behind the DirectX 12 brand and concept. This is something of a reversal for Microsoft, which has previously been mum on its plans for the API. It responded sharply over a year ago, when an AMD executive claimed that future versions of the API were essentially dead, but it's been over four years since...
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Today, AMD is officially announcing its Radeon R7 250X, a new $100 GPU that the company is positioning against NVIDIA's GTX 650 in the entry-level, discrete graphics market. Like all of AMD's other recent product launches, save for the R9 290 family, the new Radeon R7 250X is a rebranded HD 7000 part -- but it also comes along with a $15 price cut. For a card priced at roughly $100, that's not insignificant. The "new" R7 250X is essentially a rebranded Radeon 7770 GHz Edition, with the same 640 stream processors, 128-bit memory interface, 1-2GB of GDDR5 frame buffer, 1125MHz memory clock,...
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