Will KSP or better said the Unity Engine support AMD Mantle???¿¿¿

[ElLocoRodriqo]

the simple mock up of AMD mantle is that all AMD GPU's will not have to process information through the CPU, giving the CPU more room to work in. with this extra power from the CPU they can enhance the physics of KSP since the physics is very CPU intensive. it would be nice if the engine were'd to support this.

[vexx32]

Depends how it works, really. As with all new things, doubtless it will be some time after the tech is released that it starts to be integrated. Heck, NVidia's GPU-based PhysX system is still not supported by Unity... so really, I wouldn't hold your breath. Unity tends to keep old tech for cross-compatibility, but there are newer alternatives which work for pretty much anything, not just vendor-specific modules like PhysX or Mantle. OpenCL, I believe, is an OpenGL based thing similar to both Mantle and PhysX, as I understand it, but will run on both types of cards (and likely many others too). As such, it's likely a better option, as it won't exclude either branch of users.

[Maddmatts]

Mantle reminds me of ATI's TruForm hardware tessellation feature way back when. A great idea, but their marketshare prevents it from getting widely adopted. Although, I think Mantle's concept is being included in DirectX12.

Edited March 9, 2014 by Maddmatts

[Streetwind]

If all Mantle ever does is boot Microsoft out of its five-year hiatus from caring about Direct3D, then I will consider it successful.

[Bobnova]

The difficulty lies in that unity is a single threaded app. GPUs are horrendous at single threaded apps, far far slower than cpus. They shine in apps that can split into hundreds or thousands of threads. The version of C you have to write in to use gpgpu bits is very restrictive also. There is very little cache, very small pipelines, etc.

I doubt it'll happen, personally. Note how few games use physx for actual physics calculation: few to none. If they do, they cannot run on non Nvidia GPUs. Opencl? Now it barely runs on Nvidia, and forget Intel onboard graphics.

[_Aramchek_]

Mantle wouldn't do anything much for KSP anyway, the problem is not that the gpu is waiting around for the cpu to send instructions, the "problem" for a lot of people, is that the physics calculations take up a lot of cpu time and power.

Mantle won't do anything at all for that.

[Aghanim]

The difficulty lies in that unity is a single threaded app. GPUs are horrendous at single threaded apps, far far slower than cpus. They shine in apps that can split into hundreds or thousands of threads. The version of C you have to write in to use gpgpu bits is very restrictive also. There is very little cache, very small pipelines, etc.

I doubt it'll happen, personally. Note how few games use physx for actual physics calculation: few to none. If they do, they cannot run on non Nvidia GPUs. Opencl? Now it

barely runs on Nvidia, and forget Intel onboard graphics.

Its because Nvidia wants to do vendor lockout by killing OpenCL performance so their CUDA looks more powerful. Proof: Look at this: http://www.luxrender.net/luxmark/ and look how 4 7970 comes nearly close to 7 Titans!

Physx could run on CPU, but its slower.

Mantle is a graphics API, not a compute API

[Red Iron Crown]

Its because Nvidia wants to do vendor lockout by killing OpenCL performance so their CUDA looks more powerful. Proof: Look at this: http://www.luxrender.net/luxmark/ and look how 4 7970 comes nearly close to 7 Titans!

I think nVidia's going to have to ungimp OpenCL on their cards now that Apple is pushing it so hard with the new Mac Pro.

[_Aramchek_]

OpenCL has yet to mean much unless you like to "mine" non existent money.