In an age when video-game demos are on the verge of extinction, Firaxis and 2K Games decided to stand up and show to the public how gamers should be treated. So, strategy fans, get ready for a treat as a demo for Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth can be downloaded right now from Steam.
In addition, Firaxis has published a post explaining how the team approached multi-GPUs via Mantle in order to eliminate micro-stuttering and offer an experience similar to Single GPUs.
As Firaxis’ John Kloetzli claimed, while AFR offers – most of the time – an amazing increase of the average framerate, it does come with some shortcomings.
“Current multi-GPU solutions are implemented in the driver, without knowledge of, or help from, the game rendering engine. With the limited information available drivers are almost forced to implement AFR, or Alternate Frame Rendering, which is an approach where individual frames are rendered entirely on a single GPU. By alternating the GPU used each frame, rendering for a given frame can be overlapped with rendering of previous frames, resulting in higher overall frame rates. The cost, however, is an extra frame of latency for each GPU past the first one. This means that AFR multi-GPU solutions have worse response time than a single GPU capable of similar frame rates.”
Therefore, Firaxis decided to use SFR (split frame rendering) in Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth via Mantle.
“Rather than trying to maximize frame rates while lowering quality, we asked ourselves a question: How fast can we get a dual-GPU solution without lowering quality at all? In order to answer this question, we implemented a split-screen (SFR) multi-GPU solution for the Mantle version of the game.”
According to Kloetzli, SFR breaks ‘a single frame into multiple parts, one per GPU, and processes the parts in parallel, gathering them into the final image at the end of the frame. Firaxis chose this mode due to the design of the Civilization rendering engine, and because this method does not bring micro-stuttering to the table. However, the drawback here is that SFR is slower than AFR.
Kloetzli concluded that multi-GPUs should start offering an experience similar to the one provided by Single GPUs, despite all the shortcomings that SFR introduces.
“We do not claim to have the perfect multi-GPU solution with Civilization: Beyond Earth, and our current implementation has does have some limitations. Our split-screen rendering probably won’t get the same frame rates as AFR techniques, and we are currently limited to 2 GPUs. Some machines (especially those with slower CPUs) may not see high performance gains, and the highest gains will be seen at higher resolutions. However, we believe the time is ripe for multi-GPU machines to provide a user experience just as good as single-GPU systems, and with the explicit multi-GPU control provided by AMD Mantle we have started working to make this a reality.”
It remains to be see whether SFR is the way to go or not, especially when NVIDIA has done an incredible job at almost eliminating micro-stuttering on SLI systems (that run in AFR mode)!
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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You’ll need the 14.9.2 beta driver to use Mantle with this game but it’s not out yet as of 21:22pm GMT.
nope, the 14.9 WHQL is also working 😉 (Single GPU i Have)
“NOTE: Gamers with Mantle-enabled AMD Radeon™ graphics cards or AMD APUs must have AMD Catalyst™ 14.9.2 Beta (or newer) installed in their system. The game will allow users to select Mantle at runtime.
“”NOTE: Gamers with Mantle-enabled AMD Radeon™ graphics cards or AMD APUs must have AMD Catalyst™ 14.9.2 Beta (or newer) installed in their system. The game will allow users to select Mantle at runtime.”
As it says, you must have the 14.9.2 beta to enable mantle as option in the game.
Yep, I got it last night.
Really enjoying the game so far. The blood of Civilization runs deep with some decent new innovation. Would’ve preferred the voice work style of Alpha Centuar though.
I cant wait till i get my bank account up. Doing some serious OT this month in hopes of black friday/ cyber monday computer part sales. Love me some Civ. Love me some civ enough to drop mad bank on a damn PC,
When game companies stopped offering demos to their games, piracy skyrocketed simply because people wanted to see what they would be sinking their money into. So, 2K putting out a demo is a smart move to curb piracy.
Unfortunately, demos is the not the most important part of old-school gaming.
Selling a complete game without the endless line of tiny DLC is!
I honestly think we are fine considering we now have Youtube, which we didn’t at the time of demo’s.
We can now watch 1080p YT previews, reviews, let’s plays, commentaries… very easily.
The only useful argument for demo’s could be that they can showcase how the performance will be on your system. But if you are unsure, just wait a month before buying any game: by that time any issues have come up + critical patches have been released + possible workarounds to be found on pcgamingwiki.com
Hmm, Strange cuz i run it on 14.9WHQL 😉 but not a problem for me cuz now i have 14.9.2 Bta and game is on DX11.1 with RadeonPro -> still have +75fps -> +100 😀 GG IMO
yes, it is brilliant example how mantle does not hurt anyone. All mantle games are well optimized regardless what HW you are using or what API. Not like some of gameworks effects that are made specifically in mind to run well on specific HW only.
😀 Yep, Mantle is for users with poor CPU, and nuthin’ more
My Next GPU will be definitly R390X 😉 in 18-20nm lol
but i prefer gaming wit’ DX11.x cuz RadeonPRO does’t work with Mantle 🙁 , and SweetFX etc.