Will Bitcoin mining be the death of mantle?

[Captain Shiny]

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.

Not really, cause it also means that very few devs actually use that bloody thing in their games which makes it almost worthless. And I don't think anyone buys an Nvidia card anymore just for PhysX.

 

[SeekaX]

Not really, cause it also means that very few devs actually use that bloody thing in their games which makes it almost worthless. And I don't think anyone buys an Nvidia card anymore just for PhysX.

physx is just like mantle one of those things which could have revolutionized engines, but because it was developed by nvidia it never lived up to its potential.

 

[barnsley]

physx is just like mantle one of those things which could have revolutionized engines, but because it was developed by nvidia it never lived up to its potential.

If Mantle ends up like PhysX, the only real major implementation we'll see (outside of a few AAA games) is in those terrible "giants engine" simulator games, such as Farming simulator.

 

[Vicey]

Not really, cause it also means that very few devs actually use that bloody thing in their games which makes it almost worthless. And I don't think anyone buys an Nvidia card anymore just for PhysX.

You need to look at the wider play. NVIDIA offers PhysX to console developers where it will run on the CPU and AMD GPU's. This is on the XBOX One, PS3 and PS4 consoles.

The developers are then locked in to that physics engine. Once they port the game to PC they then use ... PhysX again. Now NVIDIA has the upperhand because PhysX on PC's runs best on NVIDIA GPU's.

NVIDIA isn't stupid.

Personally I don't care about PhysX it is a feature I don't even consider when I make a GPU purchase. Not enough games that I enjoy use it for me to be interested in the technology. But I think the same about Mantle.

It is pretty obvious that DirectCompute Physics engines are better, they run on all cards. And the same thing will happen with OpenGL's new low level API's and DirectX12 to replace Mantle with a GPU agnostic solution.

 

[looz]

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.

Well it was a nice PR move, people are still buzzing about it. When it was new people were absolutely chuffed, especially since it was 'free and open' for anyone to adopt.