Mantle - new open API by AMD and DICE

[Sardukhar]

I'd say indie developers are under pressure, depending on the game and company. Hare Brained Schemes doing Shadowrun - they had a LOT of pressure. Obsidian doing Pillars - same. I mean, it's friendly pressure, but it's there. Lot of expectations. InXile is only working on those two games, and one is out a year later than the other. I'm not sure I'd say that's the same as how EA does things, or what pressures are applied to the team.

It's a different kind of pressure. Trying to do a job and satisfy your fans, or create a market for a new IP is hard enough, but I imagine getting a product out on-time and under budget when it costs 20 million dollars to make brings it's own particular fun. I'd also agree that bigger studios are reluctant to take chances, whether it be on a new API or whatever. Whether smaller guys will, well, we'd have to look at a list of early adopters of standards like OpenGL and DX .

Both of you kind of agree on something important - that independents and AAA studios have pretty different strategies and needs. They have different market needs and different ways to achieve those needs. It's not just budget or size, it's audience as well.

So the question is, what is CDPR likely to do vis-a-vis OpenGL and Mantle? If they've already embraced Nvidia.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

just look at the last hours of Mass Effect to understand how these people are treated, and you think they have time to make an OpenGL version as well?

Projects can find the time they need if they are planned properly and have people to implement the requirements. What you said above has nothing to do with practical project planning.

About attention - what developers ultimately want is not attention but sales. Increasing markets increases reach and brings more sales. Plus developers understand that porting engines is a good investment and will pay off more than once, unless they don't plan to ever reuse them.

So the question is, what is CDPR likely to do vis-a-vis OpenGL and Mantle? If they've already embraced Nvidia.

Since CDPR expressed potential interest in Linux for future games (when asked about SteamOS), I'd guess they'll be adding OpenGL backend to REDengine when they'll get to it. Mantle isn't available on Linux so far. Which doesn't stop them from adding Mantle in addition of course. They already have support for different backends. I.e. besides DirectX they probably already support PSSL.

 

[Sardukhar]

Projects can find the time they need if they are planned properly and have people to implement the requirements. What you said above has nothing to do with practical project planning.

About attention - what developers ultimately want is not attention but sales. Increasing markets increases reach and brings more sales. Plus developers understand that porting engines is a good investment and will pay off more than once,

I think that although you're not incorrect in your perspective on projects or porting, there a re lots of cases where proper planning doesn't happen and the developer or producer drops the ball. I glance at my desktop and think of Sim City, the Dark Souls port, Aliens: Colonial Marines, etc.

As for the value of porting - I wish you were right and developers understood it. They often don't and it baffles me. So many games are not ported, like Red Dead Redemption, or are ported very poorly, like Dark Souls and GTA 4. It's like they don't even want the market. And let's not forget about Macs or Linux users. Although they are a small part of the installed base compared to consoles and PC, it's still hundreds of thousands of potential customers. If I had a market of thousands and hundreds of thousands standing just beyond a month or three of coding work...yeah, absolutely! Port away. And yet, so many applications go unported. Such a waste.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

@Sardukhar: Also, markets aren't static. More games ported increase them. So expected numbers today won't be the same tomorrow. Some understand that, others don't.

I think Valve is doing some leg work trying to go around various publishers and explaining all this to them. Some listen. When their actual product will arrive they'll have easier time with convincing though. This should happen this year already.

 

[Sardukhar]

Yeah, it'll be nice. It's true if you move into a market, you stand a much better chance of expanding it, at least in my experience. Recessions aside. Ouch.
The tech sector is so weird, though. For every piece of brilliance, you get another piece of madness. Oculus Rift bought by FB for 2 billion dollars. Now, I like the tech, think it's amazing, but worth half as much as what DIsney paid for LUCASFILM? Or Marvel Entertainment?! Boggles me.

I wonder if it's because a lot of the executives don't understand their product or their market as well as their producers and customers do. But I don't know. Zuckerberg should...

And it still cheeses me off I can't have Nvidia special shite on my AMD card. I'm not a fanboy, I buy whatever works best for my money, but I'd like the damn tech, please.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

Yes, vendor specific stuff is annoying when you can't use something based on it because you have different hardware! That's why portable APIs are important even though they require compromises.

About Oculus Rift - I'm not sure exactly what FB wants. They bought a bunch of stuff recently, including some robotic and aerospace technologies. I dislike them as a company in general, because of their approach to exploiting user information for profit through centralized control over their data profiles. Them expanding more in different directions will only increase that kind of control.

 

[Sardukhar]

They bought a bunch of stuff recently, including some robotic and aerospace technologies. I dislike them as a company in general, because of their approach to exploiting user information for profit through centralized control over their data profiles. Them expanding more in different directions will only increase that kind of control.

Yep! Bringing us ever closer to our inevitable, glorious, Cyberpunk future! Wheee!

Oh, wait. That's waaay more fun to play in than actually live in. Time to go buy my body armour and anonymizer programs.

 

[Aver]

Mantle will be used in Battlefield Hardline, Dragon Age 3, PvZ Garden Warfare and in Snpier Elite V3. So it seems that Mantle has faster adoption rate than both DirectX 11 and 10.

Also there is more - during Microsoft & AMD Developer Days in Stockholm it was announced that Mantle and DirectX 12 are twins in many aspects, so all Mantle games are DX12 ready and it's super easy to port a game from Mantle to DX12.

 

[CostinRaz]

Most of the games that will support Mantle are Frostbite 3 games so that's why since the engine supports it.

 

[Aver]

Most of the games that will support Mantle are Frostbite 3 games so that's why since the engine supports it.

Actually 'only' half of Mantle games are on Frostbite, but yes it's great that Mantle is implemented in two major engines. I can't wait to see how it will do in next Crytek game, their games always quite a CPU heavy.

 

[Malvus]

APIs

Besides the usual DirectX 11, is there any possibility we will get DX12 or maybe even Mantle for some extra performance boost? I hope you guys got the hang of your engine and can optimize this one proper as Witcher 2 was a bit of a mess before the EE edition.
Then again, it probably won't be much of a problem if we get a choice for DX 12 or Mantle for performance increase as they are low-level APIs and should be easy to code in. Maybe they could add one and/or both with the EE edition of The Witcher 3 (we all know it's an inevitability that we get an EE edition anyway and this is just one of the reasons I love CDPR but I'm going off-topic) so why not?
Some of us use cheap mid-range gaming PCs and since AMD is about the only option on a budget for gaming, I would greatly appreciate more performance for less hardware. If anyone here ever played Battlefield or Thief and has AMD compatible hardware they would know how magical it is to get up to 30 frames even just by switching to another API in the graphics options. But, I doubt Nvidia would allow AMD to assist in itnergrating Mantle within the game's engine but it might be a possibility for DX 12. It doesn't have to be at launch support but it can be added with a patch or EE edition. Rant over.
Now, I wanna know what you guys think.

 

[Scheuk]

I say this as an AMD card owner. It's not gonna happen.

As long as The Witcher 3 is optimized for AMD cards, it shouldn't be a problem either.

 

[TheFawz]

It's usually not too much of a hassle to implement, but hard to put in different API choices and making sure they all work well (no graphical corruption, crashes and decent performance). It would take quite a lot of effort to get a good variety of quality API's to choose from. As much as I would love to have the choice, realistically speaking I don't expect it for launch. They are also using their own custom engine, so not sure how it would handle different APIs. Based on W2 and the fact that I don't recall them ever talking about it, I really don't expect there to be different APIs to choose from.

 

[Malvus]

I also forgot to mention that DX 12 will be compatible with every DX 11 capable card (or at least that's how it sounds anyway) so almost everyone will be able to use it, both Nvidia and AMD. My bet is also on DX 12 since it launches in 2015, though not exactly sure which day and month. And since CDPR have quite the history in support for the WItcher games with patches and the FCR mods I would say they could easily do it.

 

[Scholdarr]

I think an integration/update of/to DX12 later in 2015 or 2016 (maybe with the release of an EE) would be pretty awesome IF they could increase the performance of W3 with it. I think somewhere down the line they will upgrade the Red Engine to DX12 anyway for at least Cyberpunk 2077....

Mantle integration would cost too much development resources I guess and is probably a low-level priority given the fact that the game is multiplat and only a portion of players on PC can use Mantle (while DX12 will be available for every PC gamer and Xbox gamer at least).

 

[Malvus]

I agree it seems rather unlikely it would be implemented but I mostly wanted to see the community's reaction to something like this. Maybe we could even convince CDPR to implement it after all. As I said, it doesn't have to be at launch so it won't interfere with the development but it would be pretty easy to implement along with a patch after launch or as one of the many bonuses of the EE editions. As a budget rig PC gamer and since I don't own any consoles and don't plan to either, this would be a godsend, especially after the fiasco with The Witcher 2's launch problems and since most DX 11 games today are unoptimized console ports (pretty much every Ubisoft game is unoptimized).

 

[Malvus]

I think an integration/update of/to DX12 later in 2015 or 2016 (maybe with the release of an EE) would be pretty awesome IF they could increase the performance of W3 with it. I think somewhere down the line they will upgrade the Red Engine to DX12 anyway for at least Cyberpunk 2077....

Mantle integration would cost too much development resources I guess and is probably a low-level priority given the fact that the game is multiplat and only a portion of players on PC can use Mantle (while DX12 will be available for every PC gamer and Xbox gamer at least).

Exactly why I suggested DX 12 along with Mantle since they both take a low-level approach to APIs and they ease not only optimizations since they are more efficient, they are also easier to work with and it also facilitates porting of games from console to PC and so on. Though, I don't expect even 2015 games to support it, since it is implied that DX 12 will release Q4 of 2015, and so most games that could take advantage of it will be ones released in 2016 and so on. But, that's mostly speculations and developers will probably get early alpha/beta builds to work with and so on so on and I know for a fact it releases in "Holidays 2015". Then again, there's always Mantle and it's available know but now I'm just rambling. Maybe we can will this into existence if we believe hard enough.

 

[WFMS2]

Some low-level API integration would of course be lovely for us, the end user.
But I imagine there's quite a lot of development cost and time that needs to be put into it. Especially if the engine isn't built to support it.
They'd have to edit their whole rendering pipeline to implement it.

Call me selfish but as long as I can run it at 60fps on my R9 280X at max/ high settings (no AA needed for me either) I'll be happy

 

[ballowers100]

I voted for DirectX 12 support to get added in REDengine 3 since DirectX 12 will be like AMD's Mantle and works on AMD hardware, Intel hardware, and Nvidia graphic cards.

 

[WFMS2]

I voted for DirectX 12 support to get added in REDengine 3 since DirectX 12 will be like AMD's Mantle and works on AMD hardware, Intel hardware, and Nvidia graphic cards.

Technically Mantle works on all those as well.
Nvidia and Intel just need to implement it into their driver libraries.