During Valve’s Steam Dev Days, Nvidia talked about OpenGL and how developers can take this open-source API in order to overcome the CPU limitations of the past and get performance similar to Mantle. Now before jumping around like little kids, know that this solution has not been adopted by anyone and we may never see this getting used to any triple-A games, as most games nowadays are using DirectX rather OpenGL.
As Nvidia claimed, developers can get significant CPU performance boosts using the ‘ARB_multi_draw_indirect’ command. Via this command, there can be a massive 5-30X increase in number of distinct objects per second, and the overall interaction of the API with the graphics driver can be decreased at around 75%.
This new OpenGL command cannot turn everything to magic by simply inserting it to a game’s code, however. Developers will have – at least for now – to pass it down to other shader stages as an interpolant. Moreover, insufficient code may have negative results on the GPU, even if this new OpenGL command has been used.
Still, this is really interesting as it further proves that most games were not using the full potential of modern-day – or even last-gen – CPUs.
All in all, it will be interesting to see whether Mantle brings significant performance gains, and whether developers will use this new OpenGL command in order to improve the overall performance of their games (provided they are not restricted in using Microsoft’s API, DirectX).
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Carmack was saying from almost Day 1 of Mantle’s announcement that so much of what was being done in Mantle could have easily been done in OpenGL instead.
Looks like that’s what nVidia’s saying, too. Makes you wonder why AMD needs a whole new API to do what OpenGL could do if they’d just support it better across the board (ie., Linux).
Good news is a LOT of companies (including AMD, Intel, and nVidia) are beefing up their OpenGL support in Linux, so maybe we’ll find out. If SteamOS does nothing else, it has improved the state of Linux gaming and OpenGL, which is a net positive.
Because no one uses OpenGL. OpenGL could make me french toast, but it doesn’t matter if no developers use it.
Well you can blame Microsoft for that, they made DirectX a nice honey pot for Windows game developers back in the 90s.
Exactly and I remember those days where there was many OpenGL games and guess what, they all run much better then microsofts DX.
Finaly it seems with SteamOS whitch uses OpenGL soon microsofts crap are over once and for all.
MS have had pc gaming in a deathgrip for all to long!
hope thats true as well because so far games run worse on steamos, i am waiting for everything to settle in so we can see some improvement.
All Mantel does is expose more of the hardware like the consoles do where they can program direct to metal, OpenGL does that and Playstation 3 uses OpenGL ES.
But we’re talking about the PC. Mantle was created to finally bring a low level api to the PC. If DICE is to be believed any GPU manufacture can use Mantle as well.
I have to wonder though, did these devs sign up to it because they wanted to or did AMD persuade them because it’s already optimised for their architecture?
Like I said before, a graphics API isn’t biased or pre optimised for any GPU and the fact that AMD already optimised it for their architecture, and never invited Intel or NVIDIA from the start makes me suspicious and unconvinced.
Again it’s a honey pot in front of them, I’m concerned that NVIDIA is not convinced either, I don’t want another graphics API where AMD is just interested and others are not.
They are talking about opengl extensions and i dont know about any game
using those extensions. Also there is not a single game using mantle
yet, so we dont know if they are running faster than their DX
counterparts.
What is important on mantle? I think you just ate too much of AMD BS.
what he said is that games run faster on directx than opengl, we dont know about mantle yet.
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/133824-valve-opengl-is-faster-than-directx-even-on-windows
+1, couldent agree more mate 🙂
BS, I guess you are a AMD fanboy that knows nothing right ..shesh where does all this stupid ppl comes from!
come to think of it games dont run better on steam os either. Devs have finally learn to optimize on directx, hope mantle is all they saying it is so we can get something impressive for a change.
Thats not totally true. Games that are properly optimized for OpenGL run faster than D3D games do on “SOME” engines. (Some being the key point).
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/133824-valve-opengl-is-faster-than-directx-even-on-windows
I’m not about to call the father of modern PC Gaming a liar.
mantle, direxctx, opengl, feels like i am back in the 90s and devs have to optimize for a crapload of diffirent stuff.
It’s not like the 90s where we had Glide and metal(S3 API). OpenGL hasn’t gone anywhere, just game devs prefer DirectX integration with Windows but it’s more than just a graphical API.
BTW, NVIDIA have been using OpenGL for their tech demos for a long time.
how? seriously honest question what else can opengl do that will prove a better solution overall.
OpenGL isn’t tied to Windows like DirectX is and it doesn’t require an OS upgrade for version changes.
And newer revisions of OpenGL added all the fancy features that Direct X had over OpenGL. Tesselation…HBAO.etc…..
then why are they using directx? If opengl can do tesselation and HBAO then why use directx?
” newer revisions of OpenGL added all the fancy features that Direct X had over OpenGL”
I.e. Direct X did it first and it was easier to code than OpenGL. This is no longer the case but everyone is stuck in a rut. OpenGL is just (some such as Nvidia and Gabe Newell would argue better) as good as DirectX is. There are TONS of articles on this but most don’t get much attention. The video game industry doesn’t like to change what works (and makes money).
http://rastergrid.com/blog/2010/09/history-of-hardware-tessellation/
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/133824-valve-opengl-is-faster-than-directx-even-on-windows
yeah that was valve’s take regarding their own games, however so far steamos runs hl2 and l4d2 worse. You’d think the games would run better even at such a alpha state.
So in conclusion ill believe it when i see it in other games.
Because it’s tied into the OS and driver model which has benefits, i.e less pain for developers but DirectX is more than just a graphics API, it’s sound, input as well. You plug anything into your computer, DirectX sees it, your games will work with it.
Performance alone isn’t enough for game devs to move to OpenGL on Windows, that’s why they like DirectX and to be honest it’s great in that respect, very transparent to the user, it “just works”.
OpenGL had tesselation for like 3 years before DirectX did.
True mate, feels exactly like that..what a circus heh!
But I really hope that OpenGL will reign supreme so we can finaly say f*ck you Microsoft once and for all.
Those dipshits have to long have pc gaming in their deathgrip but finaly with SteamOS that uses OpenGL that may be soon a thing of the past 😀
yes, i live to see the day we wont need ms to play games and we will have better perfomance than dx10 and dx11 that were pretty demanding and still are.
Microsoft needs to just embrace OpenGL and ditch DirectX. Microsoft could re-purpose the developers onto different parts of the OS if they want to keep them, or just put some of the money from DirectX into OpenGL development. Some things need to be open source and standardized. This is one of them…
Would be nice to have more of a difinitive approach instead of having to use so many additional API’s along with smoke and mirrors…
Seems as if I’ve been being robbed of performance for quite some time….
I think with OpenGL and nvidias GSync they have some special going on!!
Nvidia is kicking ass right now in multiple fronts… AMD’s Mantle is a big deal too but is more about progressing the industry than themselves imo.
John Carmack used OpenGL only because of its performance hacks! Carmack knows the potential from the vry beginning and these people are only realizing/paying attention to it now…I always loved OpenGL…remember how awesome it was back in the day! Every game ran significantly better on it! I would be really happy if OpenGL finally gets the throne it deserves!
I think mantle offers better feedback to the developer, he can predict better what the results will be. Also, it should be quite easy to implement in any modern d3d game, since the guy from Oxide did it by himself in 2 months.
In open gl you need to write specific extension for amd and nvidia as well, so it’s still extra work that needs to be done. Which one is better, who knows, until developers start using them and get a real grip of the potential lying in there, no idea.
Probably it would have been best that nvidia and amd had both an api of their own, easy to use and implement and then dx or open gl as a standard for intel and backwards compatibility. It would be still the same deal as open gl with specific extensions for each hw producer.
So skipping the “driver” and letting OpenGL have full access to the video card via Nvidia & AMD’s own APIs?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_OpenGL_and_Direct3D