News - Battlefield 4 AMD Mantle update released

[HEXUS]

The game update provides up to a 58 per cent boost in performance.

Read more.

[DemonHighwayman]

Can't wait to see real people's comparisons posted around the web.

[Aavikkokettu]

Only if that ffff game work properly :/

[crossy]

Andersson added that the best performance gains are observed when a game is bottlenecked by the CPU "which can be quite common even on high-end machines".

Kind of confused by this - because the examples seem to show the opposite. Should that have said "NOT bottlenecked"?

you'll have to download the Mantle update patch for Battlefield via your Origin PC client. The download is 1.23GB.

Origin only? Darn it. And that's one heck of a patch!

Then you will need to get the AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta drivers when they are released. Please note that only the following GCN cards will work for now: AMD Radeon R9 290X, R9 290, R7 260X and Kaveri APU.

Darn (#2) Beta drivers only and cards other than mine.

Ah well, I'll wait until we can use non-beta drivers and - more importantly - it supports my old 7900 series card.

[Phage]

Odd. My 7970 is not listed as compatible, but shows a 25% increase in the slide ?

[Hicks12]

Any ideas when the 7900 series will be supported? Was looking forward to this but its a shame its only supported on the 200 series atm.

[cheesyboy]

Kind of confused by this - because the examples seem to show the opposite. Should that have said "NOT bottlenecked"?

How so?

With an AMD A10-7850K 'Kaveri' APU Mantle provides a 14 per cent improvement, on a system with an AMD FX-8350 and Radeon 7970 Mantle provides a 25 per cent boost, while on an Intel Core i7-3970x Extreme system with 2x AMD Radeon R9 290x cards a huge 58 per cent performance increase was observed

Those three setups are quite obviously getting progressively more CPU bottlenecked. Aren't they?

[crossy]

Those three setups are quite obviously getting progressively more CPU bottlenecked. Aren't they?

Are they? Maybe they are, and maybe they're not. Because they've decided to increase GPU power at the same time that CPU power is being ramped up, you can't tell what proportion of that increase is due to CPU v's GPU.

To me, better examples would have been (1) An APU-based system; (2) Same APU as #1 but with R9 290X; (3) Core i7 Extreme with the same R9 290X as #2. At least then you could have got a feeling for what's going to give the best "bang for the buck" with the new driver.

Then again, it's a free upgrade, so maybe I shouldn't complain too loudly?

[wingtit]

7900 cards are GCN so they should be compatible.

[kalniel]

7900 cards are GCN so they should be compatible.

Yep, but whether AMD want to market it for a series they no-longer sell is another matter.

[crossy]

Odd. My 7970 is not listed as compatible, but shows a 25% increase in the slide ?

Good point!

Anyone care to explain what's going on?

Yep, but whether AMD want to market it for a series they no-longer sell is another matter.

Urm, hate to disagree with you but that's not correct. Just went to AMD Radeon™ HD 7000 Series Graphics and it presented me with a list of places I could buy. And "Shop AMD" (on the same site) even gave me a nice long listing. Plus IF Mantle is this great "open" system, then it makes zero sense to exclude "last years models", even if for no other reason than the PR ammunition that this would surely give NVidia.

Actually wondering if it's worth trying to get another XFX 7970 DD-Black to Crossfire with the one I've got in here. Surely if they're "obsolete" then I might be able to get a good discount! Would prefer an Asus card, because that XFX isn't the quietest when it gets busy.

[Dooms]

Origin only? Darn it. And that's one heck of a patch!

Well BF4 is origin only so I would expect the patch to require origin

[GalaxyMaster]

Odd. My 7970 is not listed as compatible, but shows a 25% increase in the slide ?

That is an increase purely by optimising the workload on the cpu. When you use a compatible gpu you will get even better results e.g. 58%.

[kompukare]

Yep, but whether AMD want to market it for a series they no-longer sell is another matter.

Well, they do still sell: they've just been renamed:
7970 = R9 280X (Tahiti which is GCN 1.0)
7870 = R9 270X (Pitcairn which is GCN 1.0)
7790 = R7 260X (Bonaire which is GCN 1.1)
So far, only GCN 1.1 has mantle. Which means Bonaire, Hawaii and Kaveri.

[scaryjim]

Anyone care to explain what's going on?

Explain? No - I don't know the internal workings at AMD But I can have a guess. Dice have obviously (unless they've made up their "benchmarks") got it working with a 7970, so the restriction seems likely to come from the AMD side. The initial support is via a beta driver, so presumably AMD are erring on the side of caution when releasing a public beta. Maybe there's a couple of new bugs with GCN 1.0 and the new driver that means they're not willing to release ir publically for those cards.

[cppmonkey]

Lovely selective testing. None of them can be compared to each other. And only one is running multilayer?
Cherry picked much?

Where is the A4-5300 with a 7970 to demonstrate the CPU bottleneck? Hell even the A10 + 7970?

The A10 doesn't gain much because its still very bandwidth limited by DDR3. Does it mean we see the opposite of what was said? They all improved. The A10 has far less cores to spread the workload. The i7 with its CrossFireX ends up with far greater scaling, maximising the GPUs potential.