EA publishes Mantle update for Battlefield 4

EA has rolled out the long-awaited AMD Mantle update for Battlefield 4 via Origin, but even if you can download it from the overloaded servers you'll still need to wait a bit longer because you also need Catalyst 14.1 beta. This new Catalyst driver adds Mantle support and should arrive in the next couple of days.

Catalyst 14.1 beta will be the initial release of Mantle, and AMD says the API will continue to evolve and improve in the months to come. The biggest performance gains will be seen on lower-end hardware, AMD's benchmark figures reveal that especially in CPU-bound scenarios you can expect a big increase in performance:

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%.

Battlefield 4 is the first game to support Mantle and Oxide Games' Mantle-enabled StarSwarm demo is expected to hit Steam later today. Next month you can also expect Thief and later this year there will be several more Mantle-powered games.

Source: TechSpot