Wednesday, June 25th 2014

Three New Electronic Arts Games to Support AMD's Mantle
AMD is pleased to announce that Electronic Arts (EA) will support Mantle, AMD's groundbreaking graphics API, in three new games: Battlefield Hardline, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare. These join an extensive catalogue of more than 40 games that now support AMD's revolutionary graphics API. All three of these games are powered by DICE's cutting-edge engine, Frostbite 3.
The latest title from the Battlefield series, Battlefield Hardline follows Nick Mendoza's journey on a cross-country vendetta against once-trusted colleagues of the force.Dragon Age: Inquisition is the newest entry from the classic series from BioWare. In this outing, legendary heroes look to restore order as you lead the Inquisition and hunt down the agents of chaos. BioWare's latest action-adventure delivers an unparalleled story set in a vast, changeable landscape. Explore hidden caves, defeat truly monumental creatures, and shape the world around you based on your unique play style.
Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare digs into the trenches with an explosive new Co-op and Multiplayer action experience. Blast zombies and plants across a mine-blowing world that delivers the depth of a traditional online shooter blended with the refreshing humor of Plants vs. Zombies. Powered by the advanced Frostbite 3 engine, Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare delivers an explosive new action experience in a massive, three-dimensional world, blooming with color and combat.
"With more than 50 active developers now supporting Mantle, we're excited to see how quickly our team's vision has come to a critical mass," said Ritche Corpus, director of ISV gaming and alliances, AMD. "We launched our Mantle API with EA's Battlefield 4, and to see it expanding into more blockbuster titles from EA is very exciting."
The latest title from the Battlefield series, Battlefield Hardline follows Nick Mendoza's journey on a cross-country vendetta against once-trusted colleagues of the force.Dragon Age: Inquisition is the newest entry from the classic series from BioWare. In this outing, legendary heroes look to restore order as you lead the Inquisition and hunt down the agents of chaos. BioWare's latest action-adventure delivers an unparalleled story set in a vast, changeable landscape. Explore hidden caves, defeat truly monumental creatures, and shape the world around you based on your unique play style.
Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare digs into the trenches with an explosive new Co-op and Multiplayer action experience. Blast zombies and plants across a mine-blowing world that delivers the depth of a traditional online shooter blended with the refreshing humor of Plants vs. Zombies. Powered by the advanced Frostbite 3 engine, Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare delivers an explosive new action experience in a massive, three-dimensional world, blooming with color and combat.
"With more than 50 active developers now supporting Mantle, we're excited to see how quickly our team's vision has come to a critical mass," said Ritche Corpus, director of ISV gaming and alliances, AMD. "We launched our Mantle API with EA's Battlefield 4, and to see it expanding into more blockbuster titles from EA is very exciting."
41 Comments on Three New Electronic Arts Games to Support AMD's Mantle
Now with PhysX (and many other NVIDIA proprietary stuff), everyone who doesn't have NVIDIA in the PC will run the physics on CPU and we all know that NVIDIA is purposly limiting the efficiency of CPU PhysX to run like crap on non-NVIDIA hardware even though it could run super fast on all the rest of idling CPU cores. Been there and seen that countless times. And then they are showcasing PhysX and what it can do by artificially crippling CPU physics on PhysX exclussive effects so in the end they look like a joke on non-NVIDIA hardware, so much crippled, physics effects look far worse than anyting we've seen 10 years ago being run on CPU. I still can't forget glass shattering bullshit they were selling to us. Go and look for Red Faction 1 glass shattering. And don't forget it's a game from 2001. It was entirely running physics on CPU, yet it looked pretty much the same as PhysX simulated glass today, that requires gigaflops of compute power to calculate 3 friggin glass shards. When you know what it can be done on CPU and has been done a decade before PhysX even existed, don't try to sell me bullshit, because i'll just diss you if you do. And that's why many have ditched NVIDIA because of how they behave with all this.
Now to return back to why i rant about this, AMD doesn't have to artificially cripple anything for Mantle to artificially look better. They don't have to, because Mantle is better by design and they don't have to fake it to make it look better. That's what separates AMD's Mantle from all the crap NVIDIA is selling to everyone and one of the reasons why NVIDIA constantly leaves a very nasty aftertaste. I'm no fanboy, i had a huge share of NVIDIA cards and i loved them, every single one of them. But with attitude they are running business now, i just don't want their junk in my PC.
Also AMD doesn't dictate what hardware to have in your system. It doesn't disable Mantle support if Nvidia hardware is detected.
Thief was not that bad and the previews of Dragon Age: Inquisition are quite positive.
I prefer AMD as a company, but if I had to play again "Alice Madness Returns" or "Borderlands 2" the only choice would have been an Nvidia card. I would refuse to play it without PhysX at high.
That's why I have that GT620 with HD6850. I don't care if it can give me only 30fps at PhysX (not that HD6850 can do more anyway in graphics) but I do care about the PhysX effects because they change very much, in a few at least games, what you see on screen.
Mantle introduced lower level help for GPU's on the AMD side but it does not harm your experience when using an Nvidia GPU. So if anything its just a bonus and nothing more...I am all for tons of AAA games supporting Mantle.
On topic, regardless of what people think of AMD, Mantle or EA. This is good for AMD. They need all of the sway that they can get on the market to turn some profit.
AMD says that is going to be open Source , we are waiting and hoping.
For now the AMD's OpenGL is poor , You can't use Mantle on non-Windows systems, you are bound to OpenGL.
For me the main use of Mantle is on Linux Systems , AMD is way back in OpenGL versus nVidia.
So if they are going to support Mantle on Linux it will be something amazing, a API for all platform's.
But wait isn't that OpenGL? But AMD claims that Mantle is Faster than OpenGL? is it?
It is faster in comparison with AMD's OpenGL . But we don't know if it's faster vs nVidia OpenGL.
In conclusion, Mantle and openGL are great , but what is greater? we don't know theoretically the should have the same performance.
One thing is sure we need a Graphics API that will be on all platforms and can cut through the driver overhead. Why should games run with DirectX?