Are AMD Mantle Xbox One and PlayStation 4 optimizations possible for console video games?
In a related report by The Inquisitr , it was rumored that Microsoft was considering selling a cheaper $399 console by removing the Xbox One disc drive and increasing the size of the hard drive. The idea would be to force gamers to purchase digital games, but some analysts think that’s a bad business strategy at this time. But Microsoft has officially denounced the rumor even as other reports claim Microsoft is still testing discless Xbox One designs internally.
The Xbox One GPU performance has been receiving a lot of scrutiny lately. Call Of Duty: Ghosts was famously limited to 720p on the Xbox One while the PS4 was able to handle the full 1080p experience. More recently, it was proven there were major performance differences between the Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition for Xbox One and PS4 . This is considered a major blow to Microsoft since that version of the game was specifically updated to include next gen visuals in the port.
Some rumors are claiming a Xbox One patch may increase GPU performance by unlocking a section allegedly reserved for the Kinect 2, so some gamers may wonder if AMD Mantle could help out even more. After all, AMD Mantle is a new PC driver that allows games to direct access to GPU hardware and helps prevent the CPU bottlenecks that often plague PC gaming due to inefficient rendering. AMD Mantle benchmarks for Battlefield 4 and Star Swarm show Mantle-enabled games can increase performance by up to 282 and 28 percent, respectively, in the best case scenarios.
So a AMD Mantle Xbox One patch seems like a good idea, right? After all, when AMD announced Mantle they even mentioned consoles , saying, “Mantle also assists game developers in bringing games to life on multiple platforms by leveraging the commonalities between GCN-powered PCs and consoles for a simple game development process…. Though the door is open for non-PC platforms to support Mantle in the future, today Mantle is a continuum that allows developers to take advantage of that work on the PC.”
But Microsoft shot that idea down pronto by saying, “Xbox One hardware provides a superset of Direct3D 11.2 functionality. Other graphics APIs such as OpenGL and AMD’s Mantle are not available on Xbox One.” While no one has said anything about an AMD Mantle PS4 patch, the fact is that it’s probably unnecessary since the APIs for both platforms already provide Mantle-like functionality. According to Oxide Games’ Dan Baker :
“Both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 have APIs for accessing the GCN architecture directly, so Mantle in itself isn’t needed for that. The main advantage Mantle gives us is the ability to have console-like performance, particularly in batch performance, on the PC. At AMD’s recent developer summit, Oxide demonstrated a PC running at over 100,000 batches per frame. Before now, this type of performance on a PC was unheard of.”
Efficient batching is critical in rendering. For example, this writer recalls optimizing the Quake 3 engine to improve performance by 300 percent under CPU-limited scenarios. And the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One API’s will of course be optimized over time to eek out every inch of performance. What do you think about the AMD Mantle benchmarks?