Will AMD MANTLE work with x86 emulators?

[teletran8]

"The idea behind Mantle is to give developers low-level access to the native language of AMD's Graphics Core Next architecture, thereby easing the process of optimization for the company's Graphics Processing Units. The theoretical advantage is that, as opposed to high-level APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D that allow broad optimization over a wide swath of GPU hardware, developers can customize their products specifically for AMD hardware."

Or will the emulator Developers have to re-code the emulators first? Sounds to me like Emulator coders will have to re-code, what do you guys have to say about this, and will this Enhance Bulldozers ability as a multi-core CPU for emulation or not?

 

[Tsumi]

It will have to be recoded to use Mantle. There's no simple way to convert a DX or OpenGL program to use Mantle.

 

[NaroonGTX]

Depends on the emulator. Like PCSX2 for example, the emu probably wouldn't have to be re-coded, but the renderer program would. In this case, PCSX2 uses the gsdx plugin to render (there is an OpenGL version in more recent SVN revisions) and it uses DX9, 10, or 11 to render the graphics. A plugin programmer could make a new version that is based on Mantle, and it could give nice speedboosts in games that are GS (Graphics Synthesizer, basically the PS2's main graphics processing chip) bound.

CPU performance would still be important since PCSX2 (and Dolphin) are CPU-intensive, but some of the load would be taken away. If the emu's were entirely re-programmed, there could be huge speed boosts, but that would be a massive amount of work which the emu devs are very unlikely to undertake any time soon. I know that the people behind PCSX2 and Dolphin are both focusing on emulation accuracy rather than emulation speed right now, so don't expect that any time soon.

Also in terms of Bulldozer CPU's for multi-core emulation, PCSX2 only uses up to three threads under normal operation, but that's with the MTVU hack, which spins off the microVU1 to its own thread. The reason this is a hack and isn't universal is because it can break some games. So really, PCSX2 is mainly a program that uses two threads only. Dolphin also only uses two threads. So Bulldozer would just need higher performance cores in general to get a speedup.

I just know that Zambezi was definitely not recommended for emulation, but Piledriver works just fine for PCSX2, don't know about Dolphin but I saw people getting fullspeed on games with A8's and A10's, so my guess is they're good for that too.