Thief is out and news is abound that the game won’t be supporting AMD‘s Mantle API out of the box. AMD has been banging their PR drum for the past year about Mantle and the new Thief title is one of the poster boys of the technology along with Battlefield 4.
Battlefield 4Â induced the same PR woes for AMD as the game did not feature Mantle support on launch. A recent patch that came months later has just enabled support for the Mantle API on Battlefield 4 and performance reports have shown that performance improvements are nowhere near as stellar as what AMD has been banking on.
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What Mantle Does
Mantle is the harmony of three essential ingredients:
- A driver within the AMD Catalystâ„¢ software suite that lets applications speak directly to the Graphics Core Next architecture;
- A GPU or APU enabled with the Graphics Core Next architecture;
- An application or game written to take advantage of Mantle.
Mantle reduces the CPU’s workload by giving developers a way to talk to the GPU directly with much less translation. With less work for the CPU to do, programmers can squeeze much more performance from a system, delivering the greatest benefits in gaming systems where the CPU can be the bottleneck.
– AMD
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AMD intends to offload CPUÂ workload and make the games programming directly communicate with the GPU. The company is highlighting that lower-powered CPUs will benefit from Mantle by not requiring much CPU horsepower.
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The Status of Mantle
AMD has just recently released its Mantle-enabled drivers to the public and as of this moment the following family GPUs are listed to be supported:
- AMD Radeonâ„¢ R9 Series GPUs
- AMD Radeonâ„¢ R7 Series GPUs
- AMD Radeonâ„¢ HD 7000 Series GPUs
- AMD Radeonâ„¢ HD 8000 Series GPUs
- AMD A10-7000 Series and AMD A8-7000 Series APUs (Kaveri)
- AMD E1-2100 (Kabini and Temash)
These are all GCN-based products which is a requirement for Mantle so if you are running anything else, you’re out of luck. Games currently supporting Mantle are the following:
- Battlefield 4
- Thief
- Star Citizen
- Sniper Elite 3
- Nitrous (engine)
With the premier titles in those list already failing to deliver on release day, AMD should closely work with the developers to ensure a release day that actually features Mantle support.
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Evolution Delayed
With only Battlefield 4 performance results to go on by, there’s really only so much for everyone to grasp on. The main reason though for the creation of this article is our observation that AMD is apparently far too loose with the management of its technologies and applications.
We wrote a while back that we weren’t too pleased with the Gaming Evolved app and with the recent introduction of the its rewards program nothing has changed one bit. As part of AMD’s Gaming Evolved environment, Mantle is part of an ecosystem that AMD is hopefully moulding and that is to create a more favorable marketplace for its own solutions. A place where low-cost CPU/APUs dominate and GPUs offer more improvements than a CPU upgrade.
But as it stands, AMD is facing some troubles getting some good traction with its projects. While Mantle maybe in its infancy, AMD has been touting it as a project culminated from years of feedback from game developers. Yes, there is a performance gain but nothing right now is going to seriously influence purchase from gamers. With AMD cards running low on supply due to the cryptocurrency gold rush, legitimate gamers have nowhere to turn but NVIDIA for their GPU needs.
Going back to main topic which is Mantle, the technology is promising to say the least but for the most part, it is being hurt by lack of cooperation with developers, failure to involve more titles and an exaggerated PR campaign. We are very supportive of what AMD is trying to accomplish but how it is trying to accomplish it is certainly not helping the overall progression of its Gaming Evolved propaganda.
The company may be enjoying a surge in demand right now but when all this hype for crytocurrency mining dies down and your console sales slow down, PC gamers will still be the driving force behind AMD’s primary market and this lack of aggression in driving progress is either a sign of complacency, laziness or just utter inability to innovate.
AMD should spend their money on improving the stability of their Catalyst drivers, and reducing frame pacing issues plaguing their Crossfire and Eyefinity setups, instead of wasting it on gimmicks like “Mantle”.
It is understandable that they are hoping to catch up with the Intel CPUs in the consumer gaming arena with the Mantle API, but the Battlefield 4 story tells us that Mantle requires a lot of cooperation from software developers, who shall have to do extra work just to make their software work well with only a small segment of the gaming market (systems with both AMD CPU and an AMD GPU).
Hence this “Mantle” situation leads me to two possible conclusions:
Either AMD doesn’t understand the basics of business, and is hoping the developers would work extra just for AMD out of the kindness of their hearts, Because if AMD has to spend good money to convince them, then in business terms Mantle isn’t an asset, it is a liability.
Or, AMD is hoping that their customers don’t understand the basics of business and hopes to make a quick buck from them with promises of a miraculous performance boost, sometimes in “the future”.
That is the problem with the AMD business model, gimmicks after gimmicks, which holds them fairly consistently at the second place in their primary markets. Anyone remember their Direct X 10.1 sales pitch? How about putting 6 video outputs on a single 5870 which couldn’t even run games of it’s times at high settings at respectable frame rates on just 3 1080p monitors. Get serious AMD, the market needs competition.
Basically it is like AMD saying, “Hey, buy our GCN based card NOW, and we pinky promise that we would give you a miracle software LATER, which would make the card you buy NOW, so powerful that you wont even need to buy our next gen cards”. Yeah right, just like they said, “buy our new CPUs, it is Windows 7’s fault for holding them back, wait until Windows 8, and our CPU that you buy NOW, will blow everyone away, LATER”. Yeah, well Windows 8 came and went and overall, very little changed in terms of raw performance.
True. Its like AMD is developing products 50 years into the future and going back in time to sell it saying that “IN THE FUTURE our products will be so good, you won’t need to upgrade.”
AMD is hopelessly stuck in its mid-market positioning and the notion of “there is no bad product, only bad marketing” rings heavily true in what AMD has been doing lately. From Gaming Evolved, to Catalyst and now Mantle, they have been far too complacent and I’m afraid we’re heading into another FX-like era with the Radeons as we only have 3-4 Hawaii Island SKUs out right now.
:) Say what you must about AMD’s marketing, but you have to give them credit for creating an unholy army of rabid fanboys in the west.
Currently I personally see three major problems that AMD faces as a computer hardware company:
– They are turning their focus from their primary CPU/GPU markets to the consoles, and the mobile platforms. If they are already second best, then diverting focus to other things is only going to push them farther down.
– They market themselves as the budget choice, but thanks to bitmining et al, there GPUs like the 290X are selling much higher than the MSRP, close to $1000, which puts them out of the range of their target consumers. This price hike may serve AMD well in the short term, but in long run, it is going to turn a lot of gamers to Nvidia’s offerings.
– They should really stop bundling in free AAA titles, because that cuts directly into their net profit.
Isn’t the unholy army of rabid fanboys a global group? XDDD
By nature, all companies will try and get in to the game especially if its right in their field. With Intel steadily improving their mobile portfolio, AMD is looking to do the same. The mobile market already accounts for huge chunk of tech revenue and its steady growth makes corporate bigwigs salivate. I don’t question their decision to venture in mobile but their execution is far from graceful.
Cryptocurrency and mining hasn’t had an impact on pricing over here as compared to supplies. The 280X/290/290X are being scooped up so fast, if you’re a legit gamer with actual gaming needs NVIDIA is the only available choice.
Agreed with the game bundles. While I am very pleased with that campaign (I got a ton of games from the Never Settle bundles) I think their arrangements with the publishers hurt their profit more.