AMD Catalyst Driver To Enable Mantle, Fix Frame Pacing, Support HSA For Kaveri

MojoKid writes "AMD has a new set of drivers coming in a couple of days that are poised to resolve a number of longstanding issues and enable a handful of new features as well, most notably support for Mantle. AMD's new Catalyst 14.1 beta driver is going to be the first publicly available driver from AMD that will support Mantle, AMD's "close to the metal" API that will let developers wring additional performance from GCN-based GPUs. However, the new drivers will also add support for the HSA-related features introduced with the recently released Kaveri APU, and will reportedly fix the frame pacing issues associated with Radeon HD 7000 series CrossFire configurations. A patch for Battlefield 4 is due to arrive soon as well and AMD is claiming performance gains in excess of 40 percent in CPU limited scenarios but smaller gains in GPU-limited conditions, with average gains of 11 — 13 percent over all." First time accepted submitter Spottywot adds some details about the Battlefield 4 improvements, writing that Johan Andersson, one of the Technical Directors in the Frostbite team, says that the best performance gains are observed when a game is bottlenecked by the CPU, "which can be quite common even on high-end machines." "With an AMD A10-7850K 'Kaveri' APU Mantle provides a 14 per cent improvement, on a system with an AMD FX-8350 and Radeon 7970 Mantle provides a 25 per cent boost, while on an Intel Core i7-3970x Extreme system with 2x AMD Radeon R9 290x cards a huge 58 per cent performance increase was observed."

Comments

High end cpu's get little to no boost

[Billly Gates]

MaximumPC paints this a little bit different. Where only lower end cpu's get a big boost in conjecture with higher end AMD cards.

I guess we will wait and see with benchmarks later today when 14.1 is released.

This is great news for those like me on older Phenom II 2.6 ghz systems who can afford to upgrade the ram, video card, and to an ssd but not the cpu without a whole damn new system. I use VMWare and this obsolete system has a 6 core cpu and hardware virtualization support. Otherwise I would upgrade but only an icore7 or higher end AMD FX-8350s have the same features for non gaming tasks. I can play Battlefiend 4 on this soon with high settings at 1080p would be great!

Re:High end cpu's get little to no boost

[Anonymous Coward]

Some games which were really slow on my system like Star Wars the old republic have improved in later patches as they now spread the tasks across all 6 cpu cores.

However there is lag sometimes when the cpu usage is at only 40%. This is because of synchronization between all the cores waiting on the other to finish something etc. That is one of the drawbacks of parallelization and why Intel's Itanium failed. Great for servers but anything where data needs to be exchanged between the different parts of the program via threads hits bottlenecks.

So the icore7 uses crazy mathematical algorithms to execute data before it even arrives to save bandwidth to get insane IPC which is why AMD can't compete. But if you have a heavily threaded app that is latency intensive like a game it can be choppy even with low cpu utilization.

There is so much wrong with this post.

First, Itanium didn't fail due to difficulties in paralleling things. Software never ramped up due to low market penetration and the fact that they shoved instruction execution back onto the compiler writers, it had poor perfromance for X86 code, and it was never targetted at anything but big server iron. It was never intended to a consumer level chip. Another big reason Itanium failed was the introduction of AMD 64.

Secondly the anecdotal latency that you experience in SWToR even though CPU utilization only being 40% is unlikely due to "core waiting on the other to finish something" and I challenge you to present a heap dump illustrating such a block correlated with your metric for latency. If you have not done an in depth analysis you'd have no way to know, but if you did I'd be curious as to your findings.

Finally, I have no idea why you would think that the i7 (I assume that's what you meant by icore7) "execute[s] data before it arrives." That doesn't even make sense. What you are most like referring to is out-of-order execution, or possibly branch prediction - both features that are also present in AMD chips and earlier Intel chips going back to the Pentium Pro. The better IPC of the i7 certainly has nothing to do with magical future seeing math and more to do with better execution units, OoO executions resources and superior FPU hardware.

It is true that in general games have no been able to scale to use 100% of your cpu 100% of the time, but it's not for the reason that you have stated and I'm quite doubtful that threading has introduced the type of latency a human would notice in the equation as you describe. There is a latency/throughput trade off, but ti is quite possible to achieve superior frame latencies with multiple cores than with single cores.

Re:High end cpu's get little to no boost

[0123456]

It was never intended to a consumer level chip.

I take it you weren't around at the time? I remember many magazine articles about how Itanium was going to replace x86 everywhere, before it turned out to suck so bad at running x86 code.

AMD strategic...

[Junta]

So gamers get a small boost to their gaming rigs, but that's not *really* the goal for AMD.

The real goal is that AMD demonstrably lags Intel in *CPU* performance, but not GPU. OpenGL/Direct3D implementations cause that to matter, meaning AMD's cpu business gets dinged as a valid component in a configuration that will do some gaming. Mantel diminishes the importance of the CPU to most gaming, therefore their weak CPU offering is made workable to sell their APU based systems. It can do so cheaper than Intel+Discrete GPU while still reaping a tidy profit.

Re:Sounds like a bit of a bust.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that misses the point. CPUs aren't the limiting factor in part because game devs limit the number of draw calls they issue to avoid it being a limiting factor (because not everybody has a high end CPU). Mantle may not offer vastly more performance in the short term, but it will enable more in game engines in the long term if the claims DICE and AMD make are accurate. That doesn't get away from the cost of lock in, but like any new release of this sort Mantle may never catch on but it may push DX and GL to change in a mantle-like direction which does then benefit all developers.

Seems like it'll screw them in the long run

[Sycraft-fu]

Well, assuming it takes off which I don't think it will. If this stuff is truly "close to the core" as the Mantle name and marketing hype claim, then it'll only work so long as they stick with the CGN architecture. It won't work with any large architecture changes. So that means that they either have to stick with GCN forever, which would probably cripple their ability to make competitive cards in the future as things change, or they'd have to abandon support for Mantle in newer cards, which wouldn't be that popular with the developers and users that had bought in. I suppose they also could provide some kind of abstraction/emulation layer but that rather defeats the purpose of a "bare metal" kind of API.

I just can't see this as being a good thing for AMD in the long run, presuming Mantle truly is what they claim. The whole reason for things like DirectX and OpenGL are to abstract the hardware so that you don't have to write a render for each and every kind of card architecture, which does get changed a lot. If Mantle is tightly tied to GCN then that screws all that over.

So either this is a rather bad desperation move from AMD to try and make up for the fact that their CPUs have been sucking lately, or this is a bunch of marketing BS and really Mantle is a high level API, but just a proprietary one to try and screw over nVidia.