Three New EA Titles Get the Mantle Treatment
Battlefield Hardline, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare will all be getting Mantle support.
AMD is announcing, together with EA, that there are three new games coming up that will have support for the Mantle API. The three games in question are Battlefield Hardline, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare.
The benefit of AMD’s Mantle API lies primarily in situations where CPU power is limited. As such, systems with weaker CPUs but stronger graphics cards will see a notable increase in performance compared to running the same game on DirectX. There is a catch though: the AMD Mantle API only runs on systems with AMD graphics cards, and only a select number of those are supported. Still, this is a good value to add, and more widespread adoption of the Mantle API is a good thing to see happening.
"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."
There is also a rumour that AMD may be opening up the Mantle API for anyone to implement, as evident by Intel approaching AMD asking for access to the Mantle API. Hopefully this means that Mantle support will spread, giving developers an even higher incentive to use it.
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i dont know what to say....
i dont know what to say....
If you weren't an <MOD EDIT> you'd know the entire Mantle API project has been, from day zero, a project working directly with EA. Specifically in Stockholm at DICE. The two lead 3D Applications Engineers from AMD have basically lived at DICE since 2006, working primarily inside of Frostbite as a testbed for working on bringing developers closer to the metal and reducing driver overhead.
I was at the 2007 GDC event where our team announced the collaboration officially and you should probably not talk if you have no idea what is going on. Mantle wouldn't exist without DICE and Frostbite wouldn't exist in the same capacity without the AMD 3D App research team helping optimize it.
Move over, Crysis
As for the rest of this article, nothing surprising really, we knew BF4 would likely be the first of many from EA using Mantle.
If this new battlefield title has a respectable campaign length, I might get it. I skipped BF4 since I heard the campaign was as short if not shorter than BF3's (which was way to short for $60).
I guess it's no different than PhysX though.
Thats crazy. In this day and age for a game to use only one core is absolutely unacceptable.
AMD has said from the beginning it's opening the API up to anyone who wants to use it, including NVIDIA. Currently, it's pre-release, and AMD has stated categorically they'll open up Mantle to everyone who wants to use it once it's released to the general public this year.
i dont know what to say....
Makes perfect sense. Who is the target audience? Kids. Where do kids play PvZ? On parent PCs/laptops. What is in those devices? Weak hardware, and AMD is hoping that it's based on their GPU or APU and this will make it both attractive to buy an AMD based PC to save money, because you'll still be doing the same light office work like normally, but with the added benefit of being able to play games like these slightly better.
From a PC gaming perspective, I really don't think EA has turned a page so much as everyone's expectations of their EA games functionality on release date have lowered considerably.
We know the initial release of EA games for PC are going to suck for a week and get more playable to become a stabilized product after 6-12 months. It seems like the single-player only games will stabilize sooner because there are less moving parts. But as customers of EA, we no longer expect fully functioning products on release day.
They are not alone, but they are consistent with their big releases. With the release of Watch Dogs, we're seeing this as more of a norm with hyped up releases from all of the big publishing houses.
It's all about lowering the bar.
Now with that being said, games like BFBC2, BF3, and BF4 mature (on our dimes) to become some of the best games ever created. For this reason, I don't so much hate EA, but rather frequently become frustrated by EA.
One advantage with Hardline is that they have a head start as it's obviously based on a BF4 core. This one may actually be stable on release day. I'm not sure I will buy this one because it is so much the same as BF4, just with a change of scenery and a couple of different game modes.
Also, I'm not saying I like one service over another, but with the exception of free games, Origin really does nothing more than Steam. You can customize your install path with Steam as well and is there really an advantage to simultaneous downloads when bandwidth is finite?
I'm not EA hater but Origin installer defaulty selects "create desktop shortcut" and "create start menu shortcut" while in Steam it's defaulty off. It's a very small thing that tells a lot.
Please tell me you are just trying to get people going and seriously are not offended by having to click two boxes or delete a link after installing something....
Yeah, but does it do this every damn time?!?! (damn you iTunes)