Oxide Games "Star Swarm" Mantle Benchmark/demo coming soon to Steam

[WYP]

Oxide Games have announced their Mantle demo, now called "Star Swarm", will be released on steam as the Mantle and DX11 capable demo/benchmark.

Impressive gains are promised by Mantle offering up to 3x the performance of Direct-X 11, allowing even AMD's 65-watt a8 7600 APU to have playable framerates.

With everything else being equal, enabling Mantle has increased the demo's frame rate by nearly 300 percent compared to Direct-X, from an unplayable 13 fps to a buttery 44 fps.

Below is a video featuring footage from the demo, at around 32 seconds in it was announced that it will soon be available on steam. As of yet no release date has been given.



I look forward to seeing and using this demo myself when it is released. Please note that unlike the upcoming Battlefield 4 Patch we will see much more impressive gains due to this demo being focused on the CPU benefits more so than the GPU benefits (like any RTS should), this is unlike most games where the GPU will limit gaming performance.

Source - engadget.com

 

[Dicehunter]

I have a strange feeling Mantle will continue to be pushed back until it fades away.
I hope I'm wrong on this.

 

[NeverBackDown]

I have a strange feeling Mantle will continue to be pushed back until it fades away.
I hope I'm wrong on this.

Its a pretty big game changer. Either companies use it or won't. They would be stupid not to because it takes little time to actually go from DX to Mantle but the benefits are huge and makes design so much easier.

 

[WYP]

Its a pretty big game changer. Either companies use it or won't. They would be stupid not to because it takes little time to actually go from DX to Mantle but the benefits are huge and makes design so much easier.

It is especially good for the RTS genre, i would love the Creative Assembly to make the next Total War game using mantle and/or a Sins of a Solar Empire Game.

The CPU benefits are simply enormous judging by that Oxide has shown us, i hope the GPU benefits turn out to be great as well. I guess we will see when BF4 finally gets patched.

 

[NeverBackDown]

It is especially good for the RTS genre, i would love the Creative Assembly to make the next Total War game using mantle and/or a Sins of a Solar Empire Game.

The CPU benefits are simply enormous judging by that Oxide has shown us, i hope the GPU benefits turn out to be great as well. I guess we will see when BF4 finally gets patched.

Oxide has stated they don't want to license it out to much.

I would love Creative Assembly to use it but i have a feeling they won't.

 

[WYP]

Oxide has stated they don't want to license it out to much.

I would love Creative Assembly to use it but i have a feeling they won't.

It would be nice to see more devs using Mantle but I am not sure many will.

What Mantle needs is some more game engine support, Cryengine or Unreal Engine 4 would be MAJOR wins for AMD but i doubt that would happen.

 

[SieB]

I don't think we will see mantle in a Cryengine game any time soon, not from Crytek with a major release anyway. They said after Crysis 3 that they are going exclusively free2play, although they did just release Ryse Son of Rome on the PS4 so it looks like they may have backtracked on the whole free2play thing. Not surprising since their free2play game Warface hasn't done very well at all.
I think that game that got announced at the AMD Developer Summit a while ago called Lichdom runs on Cryengine 3. That is confirmed for using Trueaudio so it may be getting Mantle support as well.
Would be good if it did, the Cryengine is one game Engine that could benefit most from Mantle.

UE4 has a good chance of getting Mantle support though, it already runs on OpenGL and DX. Thief 4 is running on UE3 and thats getting Mantle, so there is a good chance Thief 5 or some other game using UE4 will have Mantle before long.

 

[NeverBackDown]

I don't think we will see mantle in a Cryengine game any time soon, not from Crytek with a major release anyway. They said after Crysis 3 that they are going exclusively free2play, although they did just release Ryse Son of Rome on the PS4 so it looks like they may have backtracked on the whole free2play thing. Not surprising since their free2play game Warface hasn't done very well at all.
I think that game that got announced at the AMD Developer Summit a while ago called Lichdom runs on Cryengine 3. That is confirmed for using Trueaudio so it may be getting Mantle support as well.
Would be good if it did, the Cryengine is one game Engine that could benefit most from Mantle.

UE4 has a good chance of getting Mantle support though, it already runs on OpenGL and DX. Thief 4 is running on UE3 and thats getting Mantle, so there is a good chance Thief 5 or some other game using UE4 will have Mantle before long.

Lol you mean Xbone?
Besides that game could have been great but its rated so terrible because its all *combo hit, now press X to kill!* with the same animation over and over.

Any game engine would benefit to have Mantle support(along with trueaudio just cause its not hard to use).

UE4 would give Mantle huge presence boost in the game industry if UE3's popularity carries over to 4. UE3 on Thief is a slightly modded version of UE3 so they could add Mantle in.

 

[Dicehunter]

According to that dev video there will be a demo on Steam very soon of Star Swarm

 

[NeverBackDown]

According to that dev video there will be a demo on Steam very soon of Star Swarm

Whats more impressive is the other video AMD posted on youtube about Mantle and such. Its very tech heavy and uses a lot of tech vocabulary but they explain it quite well and once you understand it, Mantle just seems amazing with the endless possibilities it has compared to DX/OpenGL.

 

[WYP]

Whats more impressive is the other video AMD posted on youtube about Mantle and such. Its very tech heavy and uses a lot of tech vocabulary but they explain it quite well and once you understand it, Mantle just seems amazing with the endless possibilities it has compared to DX/OpenGL.

And what is equally as amazing is that according to Oxide Games it only took one guy 2 months to port the whole nitrous engine over to mantle, and even without any optimization he said there was a clear performance gain.

It would be nice to see more devs to adopt this, or at least get Microsoft to vastly rethink Direct-X.

 

[barnsley]

I know they're making a HD re release of Homeworld 2 (still the best space RTS) and they want to make a new one. Mantle would bring the game a notch up in terms of size.


As someone who owns an AMD CPU (most RTS games dont run silky smooth on them supposedly) and GPU I think mantle will benefit me greatly. I'm betting it'll come out around Maxwell.

-edit- IF mantle takes off I wonder if we'll see DX12?
Also any news on Nivida support for mantle? My steambox is currently GPU-less and if it is confirmed that it will work with Nvidia gpus I can order it a 650ti.

 

[SuB]

In my opinion the best thing to come from mantle will be a proper re-write of Direct-X so that it's not so crap in comparison

 

[Dussan]

In my opinion the best thing to come from mantle will be a proper re-write of Direct-X so that it's not so crap in comparison

This, and of course a hit on the nose for microsoft to stop being retarded.

 

[popabear]

This should be right up Chris Roberts street . Star Citizen is going to be a fantastic game and this looks like it could make it better ( only my opinion as i know SFA about game dev )

 

[barnsley]

This should be right up Chris Roberts street . Star Citizen is going to be a fantastic game and this looks like it could make it better ( only my opinion as i know SFA about game dev )

The use of mantle should help lower end pcs run it alot smoother. won't help with the ram usage though ^_^


Wasn't he recent thief demo using mantle?

 

[NeverBackDown]

If MS decides to totally overhaul DX to a way that Mantle is, i wonder if any lawsuits would happen between AMD and MS. IMO AMD could give Mantle to MS and have them use it as the new "DX" and with MS huge influence on games Mantle would have a much stronger chance.

If this did happen i wonder if consoles would still support it? They are running GCN hardware but I wonder if any of the changes that would be made would run well on them..
Which makes me think the current consoles are going to need a lot more ram to run any demo's that have been shown so far

 

[SieB]

Best thing to come out of Mantle being MS fixing DX? Er nope.

More like the best thing to come out of Mantle is the fact that AMD have done, or potentially are doing something that changes/will change how games are developed and greatly improves performance for all. As well as making the competition rethink how they are doing things forcing them to improve, which again also improves things for all. Also by not charging people for it and making it open standard.

MS/Nvida/OpenGL and whoever else aren't doing anything as good as what Mantle has to offer. Nothing stopping them from doing something, fact is though, they aren't doing anything.

 

[Zoot]

I seriously doubt AMD developed Mantle in a vacuum. Developing a full blown API ala DirectX is a massive undertaking, and I wouldn't think they'd go to the trouble without serious developer commitment. Even from a financial perspective, it wouldn't justify the R&D spend.

The RTS demo from Oxide Games is pretty cool stuff. I don't know about anyone else, but I find RTS's towards endgame can get terribly laggy, whereby you'll see your framerate plummet. If Mantle alleviates that, then all the better. According to the demo, it seems like it will. ^_^

 

[NeverBackDown]

I seriously doubt AMD developed Mantle in a vacuum. Developing a full blown API ala DirectX is a massive undertaking, and I wouldn't think they'd go to the trouble without serious developer commitment. Even from a financial perspective, it wouldn't justify the R&D spend.

The RTS demo from Oxide Games is pretty cool stuff. I don't know about anyone else, but I find RTS's towards endgame can get terribly laggy, whereby you'll see your framerate plummet. If Mantle alleviates that, then all the better. According to the demo, it seems like it will. ^_^

I agree with the bold. Makes sense. I just think many companies are probably trying it out before announcing any officially say they will support it.

RTS tend to get laggy after a bunch of units get in the game. Thats usually when the frame rate drops to the engine running really slow. Mantle should alleviate that and most likely add tons more units.