At its CES press-meet, AMD detailed the upcoming versions of Catalyst Software Suite, which will be unified to include graphics and system drivers for both discrete AMD Radeon GPUs, and integrated AMD A-Series APUs; and AMD core-logic (chipsets). The biggest takeaway from the presentation, by AMD's Terry "CatalystMaker" Makedon, is that the company will release the first Mantle and TrueAudio runtime environments with the upcoming Catalyst 14.1 Beta, due for later this month. Mantle is AMD's ambitious attempt at a 3D graphics API to rival Direct3D and OpenGL, that's optimized for its Graphics CoreNext micro-architecture; while TrueAudio is a positional audio DSP that promises to make games and movies sound more realistic.

Mantle promises "great" performance improvements in Battlefield 4, the only AAA game that we know of, to make use of the API. Mantle support was expected to be added to the game as an update around this time, but DICE' plans fell off the track with publisher EA coming down hard on the studio for shipping a game that's riddled with bugs. DICE will most likely have to fix most of its bugs for the retail DirectX 11.1 game, before EA allows it to toy with updates that add support for new and experimental APIs, let alone expansion packs. In related news, Catalyst 14.1 Beta will introduce additions to its frame-pacing fix, that will soon support Ultra HD displays, and Eyefinity setups on non-XDMA (pre R9 290 series) GPUs.