Sniper Elite 3 adds support for AMD’s Mantle API

Sniper Elite 3

By on October 3, 2014 at 3:01 pm

More and more games are getting Mantle API support these days, and Sniper Elite 3 is no different, with Rebellion’s Head of Programming Kevin Floyer-Lea noting the update recently on the official blog. Mantle support was something Rebellion were looking forward to implementing, as Floyer-Lea explains:

In simple terms the expected CPU gains of Mantle should be twofold. Firstly, making a command stream for the GPU should be less work on the CPU – and without any “surprises” or mysterious stalls. Secondly, the making of command streams can be entirely multithreaded. The native support of multithreading is perhaps one of the most important features from Rebellion’s point of view – while Microsoft had made some attempts at supporting multithreading with DX11 it was fundamentally limited by the single-threaded design choices of the previous versions.

Furthermore, with Mantle the developer gains access to things that drivers typically hide away – like the GPU’s dedicated memory, or hardware features such as Asynchronous Compute. This brings the PC closer to console programming, where developers are used to having direct control over available resources and squeezing the most out of the hardware.

As Sniper Elite 3 remains the same whether you are running DirectX 11 or Mantle, Rebellion were able to check out the difference using the Mantle API made to the game. Impressively, their first test produced a result of 88 frames per second and 23% CPU usage with DirectX 11, and 100 frames per second and 21% CPU usage with Mantle – an increase of 13.6%.

Rebellion also added a Benchmark feature to Sniper Elite 3 so users can see how their own hardware holds up. Available through the Extras menu when you start the game, it runs through a variety of different scenarios that regularly appear in the game to gauge how your system handles everything. To enable the Mantle build, tick the ‘Use Mantle’ box in the game’s launcher.

You can read more about the addition of the Mantle API to Sniper Elite 3 over on Rebellion’s blog – although note, that in order to use Mantle you will need to be on either Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 and you’ll need the latest AMD Catalyst drivers of course.

7 comments (Leave your own)

Good to see Mantle being picked up by more devs like this! It’s the closest thing we’ll have to a good graphics API until DX12 comes out.

 

gogogadget:
Good to see Mantle being picked up by more devs like this! It’s the closest thing we’ll have to a good graphics API until DX12 comes out.

From what I’ve been reading, I assume the benefits of Mantle will be rendered pretty much null and void once DX12 and the new version of OpenGL arrives? It’s a nice idea, but it feels like a return to the bad old days where every single GPU manufacturer had their own API.

 
DeceitfulPhoenix

mrthumpy,

I have no idea why people seem to be praising mantle. It bloody sucks. Every attempt I’ve made at using the thing, does indeed result in slightly higher FPS but the stuttering the damn thing causes is unplayable.

 

Its still in its early days. As the new direct X rolls around I’m sure mantle will be improved upon too.
People have it in their head that AMD made mantle now suddenly they will stop developing it.

 

Seeing as Mantle forced the changes for DX12 to happen, I don’t see it could be a bad thing. Also it’s an open platform (once finalised) so can be used by anyone from Intel to Nvidia if they wished.

I have issues with stuttering and Mantle in BF4 rendering the game unplayable, however the gfx card turned out to be faulty so unsure if it’s cause is that. Secondly Mantle has the greatest gains with the weakest hardware that supports it, not the strongest, so that AMD media PC suddenly becomes cheap games PC too because it can make good use of the performance increases from Mantle.

Whenever I see comments on it, I can usually be sure most people have miscomprehended the features and purpose of Mantle.

 

Mantle is a great API it turns a somewhat mediocre computers into much more acceptable computers (for gaming and if you have AMD components). It’s a good innovation for AMD owners and it stretches that price: performance more into AMD’s favour.

DX12 will close that need for the current iteration of Mantle I presume, there’s nothing to say that AMD won’t continue with Mantle though for future performance.

As was said earlier the danger was that it again forces all these individual API’s to come to the graphics fore again. Of course Mantle is meant to be an “open” type of thing, though honestly nVidia don’t adopt other peoples technology, they buy them out then claim it as their own or bury it.

 

RSOblivion:

Whenever I see comments on it, I can usually be sure most people have miscomprehended the features and purpose of Mantle.

To be fair that was AMD’s fault as they advertised Mantle as this amazing free performance increase thanks to low level access to hardware when in fact it wasn’t as low level as they claimed and mostly involved taking CPU calculations and giving them to the GPU as well as other CPU related optimizations thus resulting in increased performance *if* your CPU wasn’t very good.

DX12 should be interesting as what i’ve read is that DX11 and DX12 will live side by side offering the same feature sets except that DX12 will be a low level version of it.

 
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