I was updating myself on new tech. I heard of AMD r9 290X and it looks amazing best after titan. I heard that it supports a new mantle api which seems pretty cool and gpu efficient. Does rocket support it? Another thing i want to ask is which would be better among these gpus for rocket : R9 290X, 780 Ti, titan or quadro k6000?
I really doubt that UE4 will get Mantle support anytime soon on PC.
Considering that PC version is focused on DirectX, and it’s not even using OpenGL to it’s full potential.
I think that migrating to OpenGL would be better in long run than to Mantle, as every vendor support OpenGL and it’s still evolving, which can not be said in case of Direct3D, which is not evolving, but sometimes make jumps, stop half in air, and fall down (;.
In anycase my point is that OpenGL gets access to new tech quicker and you can do now some amazing things with it, like unlimited textures per object (Bindless Textures) or MegaTextures (diffrent names for diffrent vendors but the idea is the same). Using either of tech could amazing for let’s say terrains.
But the true advantage os using those extensions, is that you can push thousands of textures in single draw call.
The problem is that UE4 is still targeting DirectX10 level hardware, this point is the thing that I really don’t understrand. By the time that first UE4 games will be released it all those GPUs will be ancient history.
Thats true I guess they should. But directX is microsoft’s product I am sure and if u notice epic is using a lot of products from microsoft such as visual studio. OpenGL will be a really good idea. My other question is which would be the best as a developer among the gpus i mentioned?
OpenGL.
Both AMD and NVIDIA provide OpenGL extensions. (first vendor specific, and then as part of OpenGL if they are proven to work on both vendors).
Both companies are currently dedicated to bring OpenGL as close as possible to their hardware. Which makes sense. AMD might have a deal for next-gen consoles, but huge chunk of their market are still consumer level GPUs, and lets face the facts.
Microsoft is not really interested in improving graphics stack on Windows. If you want to play games buy Xbox. The amount of people that is using Windows for AAA gaming is neglible in grand scheme of windows sales.
And even if they were, they are not able of match the technology from AMD and NVIDIA. Due to time constrains and costs.
Actually the renderer API is less of the what Epic is using internally as:
- Mobile devices use OpenGL ES.
- Xbox one is using some varaion of DirectX
- PS4 is using libgcm
Of course replacing DirectX with OpenGL is huge task, that basically needs some huge code rewrite.
My bet is that is going to happen sooner or later. Solelely for the reason that OpenGL and OpenGL ES are more similiar than OpenGL ES and DirectX, and for second reason that Valve might succeed with SteamBox, SteamOS, or whatever they are doing right now.
I don’t see us abandoning DirectX in the near future. It’s a great API with relatively low overhead but we share many of the concerns brought up in this thread. Our biggest concern is that Microsoft continues to tie feature updates to new versions of Windows. That effectively increases the latency at which we can leverage new hardware features as adoption of new Windows versions can lag behind hardware adoption.
We don’t want OpenGL to be an afterthought in UE4 and in fact have put in a large engineering effort to make that happen, including a shader pipeline with full support for the material editor and custom shaders across platforms. OpenGL is running and tested internally with full support for DX10 level functionality and we have experimental support for GL4 with DX11 level functionality. It’s not quite at feature or performance parity with DX11 but it is improving. Driver performance and stability has been a concern but we are seeing rapid improvements there.
As for Mantle, it’s an intriguing project and I think AMD made some great decisions when designing the API. We value maintainability and stability at Epic even if it means giving up a bit of performance and therefore have no plans to add support for Mantle at this time.
Im not a developer, so take this with a grain of salt:
Mantle does not seem to be integrated currently, and as far as I know it really is only for console performance, as nvidia cards wouldnt get any benefit from it.
my amd 6970 seems to work just fine, the guys at epic I think use 780’s