AMD about to release Mantle.

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AMD's hotly-awaited Mantle API is finally ready for a public unveiling, with new patches and drivers enabling the low-level API going live from today. To start with, anyone wanting to utilize Mantle in a supported game must install the new Catalyst 14.1 beta drivers, which should be available shoon (within the next few days) from AMD's download center.

From 4 AM EST, gamers will be able to download a Mantle-enabled patch for Battlefield 4 through EA's Origin service. At this stage, Battlefield 4 is the only full game that supports Mantle, although Oxide Games Mantle-enabled 'StarSwarm' demo will be available through Steam later in the day (3 PM EST) for gamers that want to further evalute Mantle performance on their systems. Another Mantle-enabled title, Thief, will be released in February.

In AMD's primer on Mantle, the company states that the API is "primarily designed to improve performance in scenarios where the CPU is the limiting factor". Mantle makes "less of an impact" in GPU-bound situations, although the API does have "some built-in features to improve GPU-bound performance [...] gains in these cases are largely dependent on how well Mantle features and optimizations are being utilized by the developer."

Data provided from AMD's labs backs up what the company stated. For example, AMD claims that running Battlefield 4 (Ultra settings, 4xAA at 1080p) on an AMD A10-7700K APU plus Radeon R9 290X GPU gives a 41% performance boost when Mantle is enabled. On the other hand, if an Intel Core i7-4960X is used with an R9 290X, the performance boost is only 9.2% when Mantle is enabled.

StarSwarm data shows an even bigger performance improvement when Mantle is enabled on CPU-limited systems: AMD claims a 319% performance boost when running the demo on Extreme settings at 1080p, on their A10-7700K system, after Mantle is enabled. However if you have a high-end Intel CPU and an R7 260X, performance gains are lower, at just 5.1%.

There's a couple of other things to note here. First of all, this is the initial release of Mantle, and AMD says the API will continue to evolve and improve in the months ahead. There's a strong possibility AMD and their game partners will be able to squeeze more out of the API as it improves.

Secondly, Mantle, like a number of AMD launches recently, is geared towards giving a better PC gaming experience to those on lower-end hardware. As our resident hardware reviewer Steve notes, a performance kick for those with uber fast CPUs and GPUs isn't hugely important; whereas a 40+% performance boost on slower hardware could be the difference between a playable and unplayable game.

We'll be posting a full performance breakdown of Mantle in Battlefield 4 and StarSwarm (pictured below) in the coming day or two, so check back soon for more detailed results from AMD's new API.

Aside from Mantle, AMD's Catalyst 14.1 beta drivers introduce 'phase 2' frame-pacing solutions for resolutions higher than 1600p on non-XDMA hardware. This means gamers running dual-GPU HD 7000 series setups, for example, should see less tearing and stuttering when they're gaming on Eyefinity or Ultra HD displays.

Catalyst 14.1 is also the first HSA-enabled GPU driver, allowing the CPU and GPU found in AMD's latest Kaveri APUs to simultaneously access the same memory. At this stage only some applications, such as Libre Office and Corel AfterShot Pro, are supported, but AMD assures us that many more will be supported soon.

So you AMD guys report back and let us know your findings.

My cpu isnt all that amazing, its an AMD 1100 X6 so maybe I'll get a decent boost. Hell, even that 9% boost reported on BF4 with the intel chip isnt that bad either. Free FPS? I wont complain.

Gawd, why does amd gpu prices all have to be gouged! Damn you dogecoins and w.e coins out there! I'll be sporting a 280x by now :( Still good news, I really hope mantle is successful.

So this will mostly benefit people with AMD CPUs then... :P

You see this is the difference, I prefer having extreme i7 than AMD A series.

It's like saying buy a crappy CPU you'll gain much more boost rather than having really good gaming one. -_-

That A10 costs 160$, you can buy FX8320 for 5$ less.

I'm excited to try mantle out when its released for 280x. This boost could help out with so many cpu bound games

Seeing as I don't own or plan to own any of those games, I guess this doesn't benefit me yet.

My CPU is still decent. It's an i5 2500K Sandy Bridge. However, my GPU is nothing special. Got a 6870.

Still very good to bring up performance for people with lower end equipment.

I hope they allow mantle in dayz standalone, considering its all about your CPU and that would benefit us alot!

Would Mantle improve performance for older games, or would they require specific patching by the developers to take advantage of Mantle?

Makes me questions getting a GTX760 if the performance gain from mantle would make a R9 270X comparable.

People need to realize that mantle is not directly aimed at t increasing gpu performance its to lower cpu workload communicating to the gpu. Mantle is going to to see the biggest increases to slower cpu setups. Mainly APU's and AMD cpu's. While people with intel setups and AMD gpu's are lucky to see 10%. With BF4 AMD claims only 7% increase with i5 4670k and 290x, while FX 8350 and 290x seen 23% increase. Which means that a 8350 will finally inch ahead from the i5(all at stock) and get closer to the i7. But the i7's will set the gains too so again slight.

"AMD explicitly states that Mantle isn’t necessarily going to improve performance much at the top of the CPU/GPU performance stack. According to the company, “Mantle makes less of an impact in cases where high resolutions and ‘maximum detail’ settings are used, as these settings are likely to be maximally taxing GPU resources in a manner that is more difficult to improve at the API level (so-called GPU-bound scenarios).”

I assume it would require patching from the devs.

Dont worry about it, most games will not support mantle, second the performance increases are totally dependent on the cpu being used. Mantle isnt increasing the gpu performance its decreasing the cpu workload feeding the gpu. Which is why an i5 4670k is only seeing a 7% increase with a 290x while a 8350 with 290x is seeing 23% increase. Even with a 760 you still better off then getting a 270x. Because it takes a fully overclocked 270x to even come close to a stock 760. On an intel based setup and if you have a overclocked GTX 760 vs a overclocked 270x even with mantle the 760 will still be much faster. Now if you had a FX8350 cpu then gains will bring that 270x nearly on par with 760.

i have a core i5-3450, is this the kind of cpu that would benefit much from mantle?

of course, i only have a 5850 so no mantle for me just yet, but if mantle gives even 15% of a performance boost, that can mean the difference between changing some settings on high instead of medium. for example, in bf3, i have exactly two settings that have been turned to medium instead of high because in intense fights the framerate drops to 30 which is unacceptable in a fast-paced multiplayer shooter. these are settings with a big impact (can't remember the names, maybe "detail" and "shaders"?) so it is a significant difference.

ultimately, it is up to the developers to make use of it in their games for mantle to be something, so here's hoping to an end to the genre of "poorly optimized port".

if AMD only makes this work good on amd cpus, its not gonna take off very well... i wouldnt game on an AMD cpu just to have mantle work for a handful of games i don't even have.

Nope, it works with Intel CPUs too.

Though it doesn't seem that great if you have at least a half decent CPU.

I wonder how it will help with multi-GPU setups. Would be nice if it relieved some of the CPU bottleneck from a 290X crossfire setup.

Update is out, but it doesn't seem like it will help many of those with higher end gaming PCs

well two things:

Intel cpus are quite beefy in all repsects, they have little bottlenecking going on, os of course they arent going to see a big increase. Mantle to to relieve poor CPU usage on avergae to low end CPUs.

Second, there's dozens of games slated to use mantle coming up, BF4 is only the beginning

Well I do have a FX8350. Hmmmm....

Even still dont let Mantle be the deciding factor because with gpu bound games even AMD has stated that it wont really help. the 760 is still the better card period.

Will this benifit my 8150? it doenst have my cpu on the list

Well then sounds like my choice is made. Amazon has the Corsair PSU 600W for 59.99 and I will purchase the 760 when I get my refund!

Are older AMD cards capable of using Mantle? Like my old ATI 5850?

Yeah I guess that high end PC with the i7 Extreme and 2x 290xs, getting 58% improvement, isnt helping.

where is this from?

http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf4/news/view/bf4-mantle-live/

However according to AMD a high end intel with 290x only gets 9% increase and according to AMD "Mantle makes "less of an impact" in GPU-bound situations"

nope only 7000+ series

It will help all AMD cpu's and gpu's with non gpu bound based situations.

Not denying that. I have a 4770K and 290X, and this really makes me wanna get a 120Hz monitor and another 290x.

Mantle is playing right into the market also. CPU performance increases have very much stagnated compared to GPU raw performance over the past 4-5 years. AMD has pretty much dropped out of the high end CPU market anyway, and having Mantle will allow players to update there GPUs and update CPUs much less frequently.

Also since many PC gamers are going for 1440P monitors, 120hz, and 4k, SLI and CG rigs have become much more common, and those types of rigs are almost always CPU limited.

Wrong kind of cpu limitation. the cpu physically cant feed multiple gpu's the data quick enough , mantle wont help that situation enough to be noticeable if you are in a real bottleneck situation especially with intel cpu's.

I'm confused as to what you are saying. 58% increase with CF cards in a CPU limited scenario. What more proof do you need? This will be a huge boon for people who want 4k and 120hz monitors.

this 14.1 driver is taking forever to come out

@04dcarraher: In theory it could work with any GPU. Mantle is a streamlined, multi-core optimized rendering pipeline that replaces DirectX or OpenGL. It allows the developer to send more data to the GPUs for rendering by eliminating overhead and taking advantage of parallelism. However, it's also a low level API, which means all rendering specific commands are specific to an architecture, they would have to rewrite that portion of the code for every architecture out there, so in this case, they're only supporting GCN, their latest.

It could work with VLIW4, VLIW5 and even Nvidia's architecture, but rendering would have to be written for each architecture individually.

Perhaps Microsoft will catch on and update DirectX to be more like Mantle in future revisions such that it's more efficient with multiple cores and reduce overhead but still keep the high level functionality that allows rendering instructions to be universal. You'll always get more out of your GPU using low-level APIs, but it means you have to write your engine for every architecture.

Looks like public won't see the mantle driver in January, maybe early next week...

http://www.guru3d.com/news_story/update_on_amd_catalyst_14_1_mantle_driver_release.html

This confirms that scepticism was somewhat warranted ;)

My 4771 would more or less make Mantle moot.

balls D:

14.1 drivers are out now, mantle available for use on all GCN cards and APUs, and the tech demo for mantle, Star Swarm, is on Steam

Why didn't they mention the performance gain using an i3? :D

Not everyone can afford or willing to buy 4770K.

I have Intel Core i5-2500K and i7-2600 (I need the hardware VM features for my VM work).

Another problem is the future GPUs that are stronger than the current flagship GPUs.

VLIW4 and VLIW5 doesn't have multiple ACE units and GK110 has HyperQ.

When from an average of 40-60fps on ultra in bf4 to about 80-100. Quite a doozy

What is the significance of these hardware specifics to Mantle outside of architecture specific rendering instructions?

Xbox One has multiple ACE support.

Read http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-microsoft-to-unlock-more-gpu-power-for-xbox-one-developers

In terms of GPU API features, Mantle should NOT have less features than Xbox One.

You tried it and that was the results?

It will benefit the people that experiencing CPU bottleneck.

I have installed it, but under my GPU device manager it shows driver release as 13.5 not 14.1. The release date does show the 31st though. i have not tried it yet.

Really??

Anyone else given BF4 a go?

I have been lazy, but I will post up results later from when I update.