AMD Announces Mantle Graphics API

I really wish AMD had more to show about how open Mantle will really be. All I can find is how people on various sites interpret what they heard and saw during AMD's presentation. So far "cross-platform" for them means exactly Windows, XBONE, PS4 and WiiU.

AMD still do very good CPU's and their chipsets tend to be decent -- they have also done more for the graphics stack quality on Linux than ATi ever did.

So far "cross-platform" for them means exactly Windows, XBONE, PS4 and WiiU.

Exactly my fears. Whilst AMD was pushing for their Open Source drivers before Nvidia was, AMD's software support for Linux really feels on and off. Since they have their hands full with two consoles, it is very unlikely they'll focus on us unless Nvidia really starts reaping the benefits from being in a partnership with Valve over the SteamOS.

For that matter, what applications in Linux actually have a working OpenCL implementation? Blender has CUDA, but OpenCL is missing. I don't know of any video editors in Linux that make use of these GPU offloading capabilities. If Mantle comes into the picture, I feel it'll be just like these features. Nvidia may actually support it on Linux or bring out an alternative, and AMD probably won't.

So it's another 3DNow!....

I really wish AMD had more to show about how open Mantle will really be. All I can find is how people on various sites interpret what they heard and saw during AMD's presentation. So far "cross-platform" for them means exactly Windows, XBONE, PS4 and WiiU.

You'll have to wait until November it seems. A little frustrating ("hey look at this cool thing! Now wait a couple of months until we say more....";), but that's marketing I guess. Maybe they're waiting for battlefield 4 to showcase it a little more.

As for the article, I'll say this every time somone blindly bashes amd's drivers: they have bugs, sure - the competition does too - but it's nowhere near as bad as people try to make out. My way of saying that such things in articles make the article look less than stellar, in my opinion.

Back to mantle: there's a fair amount that people can do with consoles that simply can't be done with directx/opengl, simply because of the architecture - and I suspect that most of that is to do with memory addressing. So my prediction is that mantle is aimed at HUMA systems primarily, and possibly some nicer texture management interfaces (PRT comes to mind). Nothing that can't be done with OpenGL....just have to get your hands a bit more dirty to make it work.

Blindly bashing? I was an AMD graphics card user for 5-6 years until I had enough of their issues.

Here's some food for thought too https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2013/09/26/dolphin-emulator-and-opengl-drivers-hall-fameshame/.

I do not blindly bash anything.

Quote from liamdawe
I was an AMD graphics card user for 5-6 years until I had enough of their issues.

I totally agree with liam, I was a great fan of AMD but I got tired of their lack of support, I almost always had problems with games, I reported to them many times with no replies, I had the most crazy graphic bugs, then I changed back to NVIDIA (I had a FX5600 LE before), I can say that every graphics card has it´s bugs, but I can´t compare que quality of drivers, NVIDIA is miles ahead AMD from my experience, my life got much better.

About Mantle, I really hope they give a good support to Linux because this API seems very interesting and  could benefits us on the gaming scene in my opinion.

AMD is less than amazingly popular with Linux users due to their terribly buggy and under-performing drivers

And Nvidia is less than amazingly popular due to their closed nature and unwillingness to cooperate with the community, something both AMD and Intel have been far better at doing, and doing it cooperatively as a community.

I have had great success with AMD cards, and I absolutely love my Radeon HD 4670 which has been the best card I have owned since I replaced my also awesome Radeon 9200 which started me on Linux gaming. Now, almost all of this has been powered by free software drivers (even the old R200 card since it got its DRI drivers back during the Loki boom before AMD restored ATI's support for free Linux drivers) which have been improving by leaps and bounds, and I personally feel it a little disrespectful to all of the hard work being done there to make such a large swipe against AMD, although Liam is certainly within his rights to do so.

During the occasions I have used Catalyst I did have some issues, most of which are inherent to any driver setup that relies on closed binary blobs, and which I have also seen with Nvidia cards using their blob. Not to mention they have had their own vendor specific issues such as releases that burn out cards due to poor fan control and of course the whole situation regarding Optimus support. Having used all three vendors, I definitely still favour AMD, although Intel is working rather well in my brother's laptop.

And speaking of the problems of blobs, one can really lay the blame for that on Nvidia in the first place. Back during the aforementioned Loki boom all the various vendors started releasing graphics drivers for Linux, most of which were free in-kernel drivers such as those from ATI, Matrox, and 3DFX. Only Nvidia really insisted on using a blob, something which they were criticized for, but when the cards settled (pun intended) and only ATI and Nvidia remained, everyone was forced to adopt it, hindering the growth of a truly native Linux graphics system until the rise of Intel and AMD's acquisition of ATI in 2006.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4152?page=0,1

Not that this really has any bearing when discussing Mantle, which I do not really have an opinion on at this point.

Blindly bashing? I was an AMD graphics card user for 5-6 years until I had enough of their issues.

Here's some food for thought too https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2013/09/26/dolphin-emulator-and-opengl-drivers-hall-fameshame/.

I do not blindly bash anything.

Quite aware that as an editorial, opinion is part & parcel, just thought it could be a little less....."rant-y", for lack of a better word. Doesn't sound as professional, and takes the focus away from the actual topic (Mantle).

Not "rant-y" at all, it's just my opinion, i thought apart from my one comment due to personal experience it was overall a positive article.

AMD is less than amazingly popular with Linux users due to their terribly buggy and under-performing drivers

And Nvidia is less than amazingly popular due to their closed nature and unwillingness to cooperate with the community, something both AMD and Intel have been far better at doing, and doing it cooperatively as a community.

I personally feel it a little disrespectful to all of the hard work being done there to make such a large swipe against AMD, although Liam is certainly within his rights to do so.

NVIDIA is still the most popular graphics card manufacturer around, no matter where I look especially in the Linux sphere everyone is recommending NVIDIA and still saying how AMD's drivers aren't up to scratch.

Disrespectful to who exactly? This is an editorial so it all comes from my personal experience and personal observations, It's not disrespectful to know how bad AMD's drivers can be from experience, my rig has an APU in it remember, I tried using it before I finally got an NVIDIA card, it was god damned awful.

Disrespectful to who exactly? This is an editorial so it all comes from my personal experience and personal observations, It's not disrespectful to know how bad AMD's drivers can be from experience, my rig has an APU in it remember, I tried using it before I finally got an NVIDIA card, it was god damned awful.

AMD is a large and varied company, so it can seem disrespectful to paint it all with one big brush - I would say that the likes of Marek Olšák, Tom Stellard, and John Bridgman are actually quite popular with the Linux community (in the case of Olšák one is even tempted to say amazingly popular).

And as I said, you are fully within your rights to say what you said, but AMD has been making huge contributions to the Linux community, and not just in the graphics space. And Nvidia is far from universally loved in the Linux community, as Linus Torvalds has theatrically shown on at least one occasion.

Disrespectful to who exactly? This is an editorial so it all comes from my personal experience and personal observations, It's not disrespectful to know how bad AMD's drivers can be from experience, my rig has an APU in it remember, I tried using it before I finally got an NVIDIA card, it was god damned awful.

AMD is a large and varied company, so it can seem disrespectful to paint it all with one big brush - I would say that the likes of Marek Olšák, Tom Stellard, and John Bridgman are actually quite popular with the Linux community (in the case of Olšák one is even tempted to say amazingly popular).

And as I said, you are fully within your rights to say what you said, but AMD has been making huge contributions to the Linux community, and not just in the graphics space. And Nvidia is far from universally loved in the Linux community, as Linus Torvalds has theatrically shown on at least one occasion.

Ah, Linus. Not sure you should ever rely on him to back up your well reasoned views. He did no one a favour when he flipped Nvidia a finger. Not him, not linux, and certainly not Ubuntu or Valve when they have to ask Nvidia to support technologies like Mir. I'd love to be a fly on the wall of that negotiation.

Mantle? I think Liam summed it up nicely via XKCD. I'd love to proven wrong, but I can't see it.

As for Hamish pointing out AMD's "huge contributions", I'd have to see examples. All I had was an HD7950 PCI-Express card and even under Windows, the bugs and bluescreens were painful - maybe "two crashes a week" doesn't sound that bad, but when I replaced it with an Nvidia GTX670 about a year ago, I've yet to see a crash (although I very rarely use Windows any more).

And as for the HD6750M in this laptop. Goddam. I have to hold back an xorg version permanently or I lose my desktop. No one should have to jump through such ridiculous hoops (http://askubuntu.com/questions/205112/how-do-i-get-amd-intel-hybrid-graphics-drivers-to-work, just to make their laptop work under linux. Nobody.

AMD might be making huge strides, and I genuinely would like to know more about that, but for me, it's almost certainly too little too late. They've cost me money, they've lost my confidence and I won't likely buy anything from them again.

There you go, mirv. Now THAT was a rant. You're welcome!

And now, for a different (non-gamer) perspective on AMD video & Linux:

Yesterday I was talking to a gentoo comrade at work and mentioned my new desktop has a radeon, and got an enthused story about how awesome free radeon drivers are for non-gamers. He has had 6 years of trouble-free experience buying low-end (as in $20 fanless!) radeon cards for himself and family members and always having them work and continue to work through all the gentoo upgrades.

AMD has major strengths and weaknesses, and thus experience varies a LOT from person to person. They are the best at discrete cards and free drivers, but lose big if you only care about the best experience with proprietary drivers.

Ah, Linus. Not sure you should ever rely on him to back up your well reasoned views. He did no one a favour when he flipped Nvidia a finger. Not him, not linux, and certainly not Ubuntu or Valve when they have to ask Nvidia to support technologies like Mir. I'd love to be a fly on the wall of that negotiation.

Like it or not, Linus does not represent Ubuntu or Valve, and not even really Linux, although his comments came from the perspective of a kernel developer, and unlike AMD and Intel the people at Nvidia have shown little to no interest in working with them to further the actual Linux graphics stack.

Which, incidentally, is why Ubuntu has to try so hard to sell Mir to them, as by accepting Nvidia as it stands they have left themselves powerless, while people have been free to run Wayland with drivers actively supported by AMD and Intel for years now. That is one of the many advantage of supporting the actual in-kernel Linux graphics stack.

As for Hamish pointing out AMD's "huge contributions", I'd have to see examples.

Since you use the blob drivers you do not really use the Linux graphics stack as such, so no, you may not have seen them. For those of us who do, the contributions are huge.

Yesterday I was talking to a gentoo comrade at work and mentioned my new desktop has a radeon, and got an enthused story about how awesome free radeon drivers are for non-gamers. He has had 6 years of trouble-free experience buying low-end (as in $20 fanless!) radeon cards for himself and family members and always having them work and continue to work through all the gentoo upgrades.

I have been doing the same thing with more higher end radeon cards for almost the same time as a gamer and have had much the same experience.

AMD has major strengths and weaknesses, and thus experience varies a LOT from person to person. They are the best at discrete cards and free drivers, but lose big if you only care about the best experience with proprietary drivers.

That is probably a fair summary.

Well at least it's not DirectX and AMD could port Mantle to Linux someday. So i'm pretty happy with every AAA developer who prefers to use Mantle instead of DirectX :P.

But well, it's a solution to a non-existing problem and as long as NVidia and Intel won't support it, i can't see a future for this API.