Origin PC drops AMD graphics options due to feedback, support woes

Rubbish is rubbish
Origin PC drops AMD graphics options due to feedback, support woes

 

AWESOME!

Wow, that is freaking awesome, I love it. I hope Mythlogic, Eurocomm, and even Sager follow. I hope MSI and Alienware do it also. I believe Asus already does it for their gaming line.

AMD doesn't even seem to care about PC in general right now trying to leverage what little advantage they gained by providing weak APUs to the Xbone and PS4.

Origin PC gets thumbs up from me! I approve!

I expecially think this is true for mobile. Last week in this Sager forum alone believe there were 3 people who had AMD GPUs either fail, refuse to boot or overrtime becomes unresponsive, forcing a reboot.
- Maybe on desktop, AMD is a good deal, though they never seem to be able to get game fixes and or have optimizations ready for game releases on a timely manner, I think there is no question Nvidia is better on mobile.

 

Don't be so quick to write off AMD. The fact that the new Frostbite and a few other rendering engines support the Mantle API may be a game changer for AMD. NVIDIA will have a proprietary GP-GPU solution, and AMD will have a proprietary low-level 3D graphics API that improves rendering performance greatly. Interesting times indeed. Competition is very much important, and we do not know the real motives for Origin dropping AMD support. We know only what their press release told us, which may or may not be true. It isn't the first time someone is payed off to ditch a competitor.

 

I read about this last week but forgot to share it here. I wasn't really all that surprised they pulled the plug on AMD. Consumers pressuring ANY custom PC builder/retailer/distributor should listen.

 

Origin PC: Doubtful. Origin PC is a business and they no doubt did some analysis to see how much money they made from AMD sales and how much they lost in support and looked at how much time support spent on AMD issues.

Mantle: Who cares. Seriously who cares. We don't have Glide and even OpenGL is not used for PC games other than the few indie games I couldn't care less about or the occasionally ID Software game released once every 10 years. Nvidia won't support it and since Nvidia are still the dominant force in PC Gaming, I see no reason why devs will actually take Mantle seriously. XBone uses DX11.2 and so will PC, really don't see why anyone other than being paid by AMD for publicity purposes waste any time on Mantle. Mantle actually being used, doubt it.

DX11.2 will be exclusive to XBone and W8.1 And the new features of DX11.2 are all about leveraging more performance out of the lowered spec console, encouraging devs to use those features. Which in turn will encourage the devs to use those features for PC hence encouraging gamers to upgrade their W7 to W8 to benefit from the 11.2 update.
- I haven't read any good reasons why Sony should support Mantle either.
- And again, I would think it be very very very stupid for Microsoft to allow Mantle to be used on the XBone.

 

At the same time they drop the AMD cards they start to promote Nvidia's battlebox standard. It seems pretty obvious some amount of cash was exchanged between the two PARTNERS. If Mantle gives a significant boost in BF4, then Origin Pc has shot themselves in the leg (unless Nvidia paid them more than they'll loose), BF4 is a huge deal in PC gaming community.

A competing PC retailer showed their problem statistics, and while there had been more problems with AMD cards than Nvidia, the difference was like 1-3% points. This is a pure marketing stunt, nothing more, nothing less.

Oh, and in fact, this is from Origin PC's website: "ORIGIN PC has partnered with NVIDIA’s GeForce team to design and build the ultimate beast of a gaming machine."

Moreover, why you would welcome a situation where there is only one alternative and no competition is beyond all logic and comprehension. It makes no sense from a consumer viewpoint. Retailers discarding AMD would mean you have to pay much more for the product, and I'm pretty sure most consumers wouldn't want that (competition is your friend).

Just because it's there doesn't mean you have to buy it.

 

There are several news articles questioning the decision of Origin in dropping AMD GPU's, but not it's CPU's. As the above poster said, it certainly sounds like Nvidia may have something to do with it. Some time ago, Intel was heavily fined for attempting to pull a similar stunt : Intel fined record $1.45 billion in AMD antitrust case .

Regarding mantle, if it is like Glide, it will certainly be successful. And being already used in the Frostbite 3 engine, will certainly be an interesting testbed for the API. Regarding DX vs OpenGL, I can tell you that DX is certainly more pleasant to use than OpenGL when programming (even though I mostly use OpenGL for required crossplatform purposes, and DirectX is higher level than OpenGL), but as linux gaming is starting to get more proeminent (think Steam Box), OpenGL will start getting the upper hand again.

Back to Mantle API, being supported in both consoles means that porting a game from one to another is certainly feasable, and probably even easier (considering the mess that the previous Playstation SDK was). The only downside, IMO, is being a proprietary solution. This biases the buyer quite a lot (much like Nvidia Physx), especially when their favorite titles use that technology. Time will tell, but I think AMD is finally starting to come out of their all-time low. Which is great news for us consumers!

 

Choice is good IMO, it should be up to the user.

 

Mantle will die. Give it up already folks. Use your brains.

#1 Mantle is a step backwards for console development. Consoles have direct metal to metal hardware access. A low level API proprietary crap from AMD would be inferior and a step backwards.

#2 Microsoft has every reason under the sun to squash Mantle. Either make sure the devs don't use it or make sure it's a huge hassle for gamers to switch to enable Mantle, most XBone users no doubt won't since it won't have any performance benefit over console metal to metal hardware access already.

EA is a big XBone partner. And Microsoft will keep a strangle hold control over the games on their platform. EA will do what Microsoft wants, not what some AMD wants. Microsoft will make sure ALL games have the same performance and experience on their system. Just as they make sure Windows experience is the same on ALL PCs, on ALL tablets, on ALL phones. What gives anyone the idea they will do anything different on their console flabbergasts me. They will do everything to make sure all games on XBone and Windows 8 will be using DX 11.2, not some third party API from a company most gamers disdain for their inferior CPUs and problematic GPUs.

 

At least Mantle seeks to be something more than the gimmicky Physx. Have had a 580 gtx for 2 years and never had any benefits from Physx. Now if Mantle, instead of adding "cool" effects, improves the utilization of the hardware thus giving me more fps, now thats a feature I'd like to have.

 

I believe it can make porting quite a bit more easy from console games to desktop games. If one develops for XBox using XNA, porting isn't (much of) an issue. But if you are developing for PS3 (and I presume 4), as you've said, they'll be using a very low level API that is completely unsupported on the desktop world. Hopefully, Mantle will end up not being proprietary, and Nvidia and Intel can also jump in. It would also be important to provide a fallback mechanism to DX if mantle is unsupported (otherwise just porting games to a card manufacturer is regressing almost 30 years). Up to 9 extra draw calls by removing CPU overhead is certainly something quite useful, ensuring that the CPU doesn't bottleneck the card. And regarding Physx, Nvidia could have made it something better before buying Ageia. They could have made so it would run on any hardware (much like OpenCL, but it could even be by using old school GP-GPU programming techniques such as via shaders or geometry buffers). I hope AMD doesn't go that same road. Let's wait and see. Still, AMD will be kicking for quite a while, since it has GPUs on all 3 major consoles and CPUs on 2 of those 3.

 

Well you can see AMD wants all console ports to use it least as a "may as well" feature.

AMD does say they are developing it at the request of developers.