@Vashyo: I only mentioned the big studios, calm down!

Still, the point remanins. Cloud Imperium Games is making 1 game and as far as I know Oxide still hasn't announced any games, only that they are working on an engine. Is it worth betting on Mantle now given how little we know about it?

Even the Battlefield 4 Mantle patch isn't even out yet to know how much of a real performance benefit it brings!

That logic works the other way around too, why ignore it if you could get something more for your money?

Chris Roberts of CIG said this about mantle

"Some of you may have seen that we announced our intention to support AMD’s Mantle with Star Citizen. We didn't do this because AMD sends us lots of high cards (although that doesn’t hurt). We are doing this because it increases the ability of a PC to get the most out of its incredibly powerful hardware. Going to the hardware without an huge inefficient API like DirectX allows us to radically increase the number of draw calls in a frame – At last week’s AMD developer conference Nitrous, which is a new company working on a next gen PC engine, demoed a scene with over 100,000 drawcalls per frame running at over 60 FPS through Mantle. To put that in context last gen stuff (and a bunch of PC games gated by DirectX) have been stuck around 2,000 - 3,000 drawcalls and next gen consoles (like PS4) can do 10,000 - 15,000 or so. We’re supporting Mantle to push PC graphics performance higher – it’s been gated too long by DirectX’s inefficiency and abstraction, which has only gotten worse as Microsoft becomes less interested in the PC as a gaming platform. I would love NVidia and Intel to have Mantle drivers (as the API is designed to be non GPU architecture specific) but if not we would support NVidia or Intel drivers that would allow us to get to the metal (GPU Hardware) efficiently and take advantage of parallelism in CPU cores (for efficient batching of data between the game and the GPU). "

Every article makes it sound like its gonna be a huge boon for anyone capable of using it, so I don't think you should just brush it aside simply because it was only just recently announced.

I'm only saying that buying now any CPU, APU or GPU just based on the promise of Mantle is a gamble. It can work and you'll take advantage of it, and it can fail to gain traction and you'll get nothing out of it (after all, devs won't stop using Direct X or Open GL, so adopting Mantle means increasing costs).

To put it in another way, the best thing to do now is buy whatever CPU or GPU that will be able to let you play the games you want how you want. If they are Mantle compatible then great, you'll get extra performance out of them and increase the detail, resolution, AA or whatever. If it's not Mantle compatible, at least you know you won't lose anything, games will still perform as they did.

Also the innards need to be colour coordinated.
That power supply seems a tad overkill.

You're essentially saying that ignore it and satisfy for whatever you get right now, what I'm saying is that get something that supports mantle that satisfy you allready and you could get something more later on. :)

going Intel/Nvidia route will be a bigger gamble, imo. They havent really responded in anyway yet, whetever they will license the tech or whetever they do something else or nothing at all, also there's no idea whetever mantle would be worse on their tech like physx can't be used on AMD GPUs and you cant use some features of it. You could get a new 780ti then someone who got the 150$ cheaper 290x is actually having a better FPS than you do in your favorite new game. I believe the frustration could be huge for some performance/value minded consumers.

It's a very fresh tech and some big players in the industry intend to use it, they could have even more studios in their roster that haven't been announced. It's not really something AMD is trying to drive down your throat, it was originally asked by game developers, especially Dice's Johan Andersson since he's the man that got the ball rolling in the first place. It's gotten very positive reception so far, so I don't see why you can't be a bit excited about it. :)

PS

I'd rather we drop this here cause we're hogging the thread, lol. It's just opinion argument anyways, we're not gonna come to conclusion.

Mantle doesn't have any CPU specific abstraction that I'm aware of, it's all GPU only and if you want to use it and take advantage of the heap of developers who intend to support it, then an AMD GPU is the only way forward.

The CPU benefits thanks to the less CPU overhead due to draw cells, thus if you go Intel and Mantle really does take off, it means you won't have to upgrade for even longer, thus Mantle fully supports Intel CPU's, Via CPU's and AMD's CPU's which run x86, you don't need an APU or even an AMD CPU to use it, it's CPU agnostic.
I still recommend an Intel 4670K over something like the FX series, due to it's superior single threaded performance that's vital for a few subset of games.

I'm not 100% sure Intel chips can use all features of mantle (or at all), atleast I've seen that issue pop up at times overclockers.net in many threads. But it's only guessing at this point without benchmarks.

Will see once BF4 patch comes

Intel CPU's can use mantle. - Because Mantle doesn't abstract any of the CPU stuff, only GPU.
Intel graphics right now probably won't untill Intel Develops drivers for the API, but if you're a gamer you shouldn't be using Intel Decelerator graphics anyhow.

CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1035T 3.1GHz OC
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 6850
RAM: Crucial Ballistix 16 GB DDR3 1600MHz
HDD: 1TB 7200RPM + 1TB iomega external + 120GB 5400RPM
OS: Win7 64-bit + Ubuntu 11.10 64-bit
PSU: XFX Pro 850W Core Edition
Cooler: Corsair H60

That's a pretty decent machine to be upgrading "from". :P
Get a better cooler and push that Phenom 2 x6 to 4ghz with a 3ghz NB clock and it is still enough for many years to come. (I have a 1090T and a 1045T as well as an FX 8120 currently. - Although the 1045T isn't being used.)

Drop in a Radeon 7950/7970/R9 280/280X/290/290X and you would easily handle next gen gaming.

The FX was more of a side-grade if anything.

You can push the scores up 10-15% by boosting the NB clock to 3ghz on the Phenoms, granted you get orders-of-magnitude increases in heat, but in my own testing 1.45v core voltage is easily sustainable with decent cooling.


On the flip side, you can feel happy you're going to pretty much have AMD's fastest CPU well into 2015. :)