News - AMD Mantle boosts Battlefield 4 performance by 45 per cent

[shaithis]

AMD clearly didn't get nvidia on board because they aren't a charity. The system appears to be designed to improve performance on GCN first, just like CUDA is designed for Kepler architecture.

The difference is AMD has been pushing this as an open standard....

[kompukare]

Right, some early quick benches from actual sites are in:
http://www.hardwareluxx.de/index.php...s-directx.html
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages...preview,2.html (cause page 2 is more interesting)

Guru3D tried a deliberately CPU limited setting (1080P on med with an SB-E and a R9-290X) and got a huge gain there. But since Crossfire 290X Mantle still has issues that is not a realistic setting. Still even Crossfire 280X on an i5 or FX CPU might see something similar.

EDIT: Computerbase has some preliminaries too:
http://www.computerbase.de/news/2014...ner-benchmark/

[kompukare]

Another one:
http://www.golem.de/news/amds-mantle...-104261-3.html
This time 64-multiplayer which is what people were really waiting for

[Phage]

Interesting. Guru 3D thinks my 7970 will be supported. From the FAQ.

Q: What hardware is supported with Mantle?
A: At this time, the following Graphics Core Next-based products are supported:

AMD Radeon™ R9 Series graphics
AMD Radeon™ R7 Series graphics
AMD Radeon™ HD 7000 Series graphics
AMD Radeon™ HD 8000 Series graphics
2014 AMD A-Series APUs (“Kaveri”)

Please note that notebooks based on AMD PowerXpress™ and AMD Enduro technologies are not currently supported. Support for these configurations will be added in a later AMD Catalyst™ driver release

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages...preview,3.html

[aidanjt]

There's no reason why the HD 7000 series and older couldn't support it. Mantle is suppose to be GPU agnostic, as long as the GPU is a turing complete machine (and any GPGPU should be), it should be able to execute Mantle commands. GCN cards will likely perform better, and AMD will almost certainly put the majority of Mantle driver development behind GCN cards, but they can expand if they have the will and resources.

[kompukare]

Well, as suspected for now Mantle is all about lowering CPU usage (obviously if a game is actually designed with Mantle the saved CPU usage could be used for something else).

Now, not sure whether BF4's Ultra setting uses MSAA since there might be issues with MSAA and Mantle for now (it is a brand new renderer after all). But pclab.pl have some results with CPUs below LGA2011:
http://pclab.pl/art55953-3.html

Huge gains in multiplayer even with an i7-4770K. The i3 and Pentium differences really large - as in over 80% faster. Will be interesting to see how all the UsualCrowd (everything AMD does is wrong...) spin this one.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The only thing with pclabs,is they have a history of having quite low performance for the AMD CPUs they have in many games they test. The last time they tested BF4 MP they used a tiny map(Domination type) with a lower number of players,which inflated the numbers for Intel CPUs.

This contradicted what people like Sweclockers(and many others were seeing with the game),on larger maps which were nearly full. Their overclock numbers with AMD CPUs also show abnormally low gains,which again means there appears to be something wrong with their AMD rig. For example the FX6350 is slower than the Core i3 4330 in all instances with BF4,which seems weird especially from other reviews which don't seem to indicate this,especially since BF4 is known for good distribution of loads over multiple threads.

The increases look decent,but I wouldn't trust absolute numbers from pclab,unless other review sites back up the absolute numbers in a similar way. A word of warning.

Edit!!

Just look at the numbers for the R9 290X with an FX8350 and a Core i5 4670K without Mantle,which are nearly 40% higher in BF4 MP at Ultra quality.

However look at a larger Campaign MP map:

http://www.sweclockers.com/image/dia...c7cc66fb1aa243



The reviewer from Sweclockers indicated on a forum that they used at least 3X180 second run throughs with a minimum of 50 players(IIRC) on each run through.

So,please don't consider their BF4 performance figures as a good comparison between different CPU designs,ie, just compare Intel to Intel and AMD to AMD.

Second Edit!!

Also look at the GTX780 results against the R9 290X.



Emm??

How is the GTX780TI 40% faster than a R9 290X without Mantle??

Third Edit!!

BTW,kompukare don't consider this as a criticism of what you posted,indeed the Intel to Intel and AMD to AMD gains look decent. However,people will compare each CPU model,so its just a little warning to people from what I have seen with that site.

[kalniel]

Interesting. Guru 3D thinks my 7970 will be supported. From the FAQ.

Q: What hardware is supported with Mantle?
A: At this time, the following Graphics Core Next-based products are supported:

AMD Radeon™ R9 Series graphics
AMD Radeon™ R7 Series graphics
AMD Radeon™ HD 7000 Series graphics
AMD Radeon™ HD 8000 Series graphics
2014 AMD A-Series APUs (“Kaveri”)

Please note that notebooks based on AMD PowerXpress™ and AMD Enduro technologies are not currently supported. Support for these configurations will be added in a later AMD Catalyst™ driver release

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages...preview,3.html

They are supported, but at the moment there's little gain as GCN1.0 needs further 'optimisation' (groan). See the known issues document from AMD.

[kompukare]

Computerbase did test 280X (aka 7970), 270X (7870) as well. In multiplayer (which is what really counts), Tahiti gained +13%. So not as good as Hawaii which gained +28%, but of course they were testing with a i7-4770K so less CPUs should gain more.
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/g...amds-mantle/2/

Anyway, the more relevant part is surely min FSP not average or max, and from the way Mantle works I would expect to see the most gains there.

[Phage]

Looks good for me then. Mantle would mean that I can probably skip an entire upgrade cycle

[kalniel]

Looks good for me then. Mantle would mean that I can probably skip an entire upgrade cycle

With the slow-down in CPU-speed improvements between generations as well it's quite handy.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

LibreOffice 4.2 Mantle support:

http://beta.slashdot.org/story/197531

Eh??

[Phage]

Just tried mantle. Awful stutters, freezing and crashes at the end of each map. Back to DX11 for me. I'll wait for the next version.