Will Bitcoin mining be the death of mantle?

[Captain Shiny]

I don't know if that concern was already expressed on the forum but this thought recently came up and I'd like to discuss it.

So bitcoin mining still massively drives up the prices of AMD Gaming cards so much that they basically make no sense for gaming - at least in the US. So my concern is that not enough AMD cards make it into the hands of gamers so that the adoption rate of mantle would be too low for game developers to support it which would basically mean a death on arrival for mantle if it goes on like that. On a positive note: Prices are still normal here in germany - don't know about other countries but I doubt that this will be enough to get Mantle as widespread as it needs to become relevant.

So, what's your take on that?

 

[dalewakelin]

The new direct X already killed mantle

 

[Captain Shiny]

The new direct X already killed mantle

Propably, I'm not so sure, yet cause I haven't heard enough about DX12 to form an opinion. For example I don't know if it'll be compatible with current generation graphics cards and if it will be available for Windows 7 as well. If both things apply and it actually delivers performance wise, than yeah, sure.

 

[SieB]

Bitcoin wont effect Mantle, the development side of things is where the success or failure of Mantle will be determined. Whether there are enough AMD cards in gamers hands or not, as long as developers are using Mantle it will live on. The only thing bitcoin kills as far as AMD cards are concerned is bang for buck because the usually cheaper prices of the cards are higher and they aren't priced as good as they are supposed to be price to performance wise.

At least that is how it is in America at the moment, here and in Europe prices are pretty much how they are supposed to be.

 

[Captain Shiny]

Bitcoin wont effect Mantle, the development side of things is where the success or failure of Mantle will be determined. Whether the are enough AMD cards in gamers hands or not, as long as developers are using Mantle it will live on. The only thing bitcoin kills as far as AMD cards are concerned is bang for buck because the usually cheaper prices of the cards are higher and they aren't priced as good as they are supposed to be price to performance wise.

At least that is how it is in America at the moment, here and in Europe prices are pretty much how they are supposed to be.

I propably didn't express myself very well. What I mean is - developers won't use mantle if there aren't enough gamers with AMD cards. That's my theory at least.

BTW. Although I have an Nvidia card myself (a GTX 760) we need as much competition as possible, so I'm all for it that mantle succeeds to a degree. It already spawned a very positive reaction from microsoft in terms of DirectX and Nvidia in terms of OpenGL optimization.

 

[SieB]

I propably didn't express myself very well. What I mean is - developers won't use mantle if there aren't enough gamers with AMD cards. That's my theory at least.

Although minners are buying up a lot of cards there are still plenty out there in gamers hands. For developers not to use Mantle for those reasons it would be if there were literally no gamers with AMD cards.

Only America is affected, the whole of Europe and Asia still have plenty of AMD users. Mantle also works on 7000 series AMD cards as well, and they have been out for three years now, so there are plenty of people to develop Mantle for right there.

There are still plenty R8 and R9 cards out there also. GPU mining is slowly dying now and there are already games that are in development that will be using Mantle that wont even be out till next year. So by the time everything is back to normal Mantle will still be around.

 

[looz]

Mantle was a proof of concept, not as much a serious API. You'd have to be daft to think that game devs are willing to throw away their DirectX experience in favour of an API limited to radeon cards.

It is equally daft to mine bitcoin with a GPU - I guess you meant to say altcoins?

 

[SeekaX]

mantle is completely irrelevant already, it did what it was supposed to do and now it is going to die.

 

[vorticalbox]

mantle is completely irrelevant already, it did what it was supposed to do and now it is going to die.

Forced microsoft into updating dx.

Even though gamers might not be buying as many cards, all these miners buying cards cant be doing anything bad for amd's bank balance.

 

[SeekaX]

Forced microsoft into updating dx.

Even though gamers might not be buying as many cards, all these miners buying cards cant be doing anything bad for amd's bank balance.

looking at their stock they are still in the gutter.

 

[d3rrial]

Yeah... Mining is kinda dying at the moment... For some reason mining pretty much all coins has become majorly improfitable. I don't know if that's a bad thing tho. If people stop mining all those weed-alt-coins, they will eventually die, leaving the strong ones to survive, creating a more stable ecosystem.

My 3 GTX 750Tis are doing ~880kh/s total @Auroracoin at the moment btw.

 

[NeverBackDown]

Prices in the US are only so high is because every etailer is jacking the prices to make far bigger profits. Prices have slightly dropped but with the recent addition of the 290x Lightning the prices have raised slightly once again. Very much a greedy thing thats happening. 'Murica for ya.

 

[nepas]

Mantle=nothing to do with mining
and now that cudaminer seems to be doing sooo well,I am giving up on even looking at a new card,its all a joke now.

 

[Vicey]

People do not buy AMD graphics cards to mine Bitcoin. They buy them to mine SCRYPT based currencies such as Dogecoin, Litecoin, Digicoin, Novacoin and so on.

The reason they do this is because Bitcoin is based on AES256 which doesn't need a lot of memory to do its calculations. This means ASICs can be designed which process AES256 incredibly efficiently.

SCRYPT uses more memory than processing which raises the complexity and cost of building an ASIC. Thus SCRYPT is still worth mining on graphics cards, well AMD ones.

But this situation is changing. Some SCRYPT based currencies like Litecoin have started to gain in value. This is why all the AMD cards have suddenly become very expensive. And with this increase in value the development of SCRYPT based FPGA's and ASIC's has become viable.

What does this mean? - It means there is going to be a point probably in the next 12 months where a < 10 Watt SCRYPT ASIC arrives with the same mining performance as a R9 280.

Once this happens the prices will go back to normal for AMD cards.

 

[d3rrial]

People do not buy AMD graphics cards to mine Bitcoin. They buy them to mine SCRYPT based currencies such as Dogecoin, Litecoin, Digicoin, Novacoin and so on.

The reason they do this is because Bitcoin is based on AES256 which doesn't need a lot of memory to do its calculations. This means ASICs can be designed which process AES256 incredibly efficiently.

SCRYPT uses more memory than processing which raises the complexity and cost of building an ASIC. Thus SCRYPT is still worth mining on graphics cards, well AMD ones.

But this situation is changing. Some SCRYPT based currencies like Litecoin have started to gain in value. This is why all the AMD cards have suddenly become very expensive. And with this increase in value the development of SCRYPT based FPGA's and ASIC's has become viable.

What does this mean? - It means there is going to be a point probably in the next 12 months where a < 10 Watt SCRYPT ASIC arrives with the same mining performance as a R9 280.

Once this happens the prices will go back to normal for AMD cards.

There are already these beauties: http://hashra.com/gridseed-6-mh-s-asic-scrypt-sha-miner/

6mh/s for 140W, which is damn impressive

 

[Captain Shiny]

People do not buy AMD graphics cards to mine Bitcoin. They buy them to mine SCRYPT based currencies such as Dogecoin, Litecoin, Digicoin, Novacoin and so on.

The reason they do this is because Bitcoin is based on AES256 which doesn't need a lot of memory to do its calculations. This means ASICs can be designed which process AES256 incredibly efficiently.

SCRYPT uses more memory than processing which raises the complexity and cost of building an ASIC. Thus SCRYPT is still worth mining on graphics cards, well AMD ones.

But this situation is changing. Some SCRYPT based currencies like Litecoin have started to gain in value. This is why all the AMD cards have suddenly become very expensive. And with this increase in value the development of SCRYPT based FPGA's and ASIC's has become viable.

What does this mean? - It means there is going to be a point probably in the next 12 months where a < 10 Watt SCRYPT ASIC arrives with the same mining performance as a R9 280.

Once this happens the prices will go back to normal for AMD cards.

I see, thanks for the explanation. I don't know much about the different kinds of mining since it's generally not profitable due to high energy prices here in germany. I only know that it affects prices of AMD GPUs in the US.

So, the general consensus seems to be that mantle isn't going to lift off anyway but that it's not due to coin mining.

Mantle was a proof of concept, not as much a serious API. You'd have to be daft to think that game devs are willing to throw away their DirectX experience in favour of an API limited to radeon cards.

It is equally daft to mine bitcoin with a GPU - I guess you meant to say altcoins?

I was thinking about this, too but on the other hand I'm not so sure - would AMD really take one for the team just to drive the technology further? Cause the development of mantle couldn't have been easy or cheap.

 

[barnsley]

I was thinking about this, too but on the other hand I'm not so sure - would AMD really take one for the team just to drive the technology further? Cause the development of mantle couldn't have been easy or cheap.

Its kind of what seems to happen with Nvidia with PhysX (except Nvidia bought it not made it). It'll pop up from time to time as an option in some games but it won't be a total game changer.


also, slightly off topic, Wikipedia lists the ps4 and xbone as devices that support physX. Can't tell if thats bull as both consoles are AMD based (meaning that PhysX would probably be loaded onto the cpu not gpu if its anything like pc) or not.

 

[Captain Shiny]

Its kind of what seems to happen with Nvidia with PhysX (except Nvidia bought it not made it). It'll pop up from time to time as an option in some games but it won't be a total game changer.


also, slightly off topic, Wikipedia lists the ps4 and xbone as devices that support physX. Can't tell if thats bull as both consoles are AMD based (meaning that PhysX would probably be loaded onto the cpu not gpu if its anything like pc) or not.

No, that's actually not bullshit!
http://nvidianews.nvidia.com/Releas...uter-Entertainment-s-PlayStation-R-4-941.aspx
Wow, who would have thought. But I guess it's like physx support on PC if you don't have an Nvidia GPU so that it's only done by the CPU without GPU acceleration.

 

[NeverBackDown]

PhysX just makes use of GPGPU type language. So its not that only Nvidia cards can run it. Its that only Nvidia allows it to run on their own cards. What happens when the game is told to use PhysX with no Nvidia card, as you all said earlier, it runs on the CPU. It runs much much slower though because CPUs don't have the parallel processing power GPUs have. So it will be interesting to see how Devs actually use this tech for their games.

 

[Vicey]

It has been found that NVIDIA does not make use of SSE3, SSSE3, or SSE4.1 when PhysX runs on the CPU. This means its floating point performance is significantly reduced.

Some hackers were able to combine the PhysX drivers pre-NVIDIA purchase with some of NVIDIA's post-purchase drivers to enable SSE4 instructions and saw performance parity with a high end NVIDIA card when doing PhysX calculations.

Essentially NVIDIA cripples PhysX when running on just the CPU on purpose. Smart business decision, they want to sell you GPUs.