Tuesday, January 14th 2014

Mantle Enables Significant Performance Improvement in Battlefield 4: AMD

by
btarunr
 Discuss (74 Comments)
In what could explain AMD's move to include copies of one of the most GPU-intensive games with its new A-Series APUs, the company revealed that Mantle, its ambitious attempt at a 3D graphics API to rival DirectX and OpenGL, "enables up to 45 percent faster performance" than DirectX in Battlefield 4, the only known game with planned support for Mantle, and one of the most popular PC games of the season. AMD's claims are so tall, that even a 512 stream processor-laden A10-7850K APU could offer acceptable frame-rates at 1080p, while a $299 Radeon R9 280X could run circles around a $650 GeForce GTX 780 Ti at this particular game. If anything, it could help Battlefield 4 become a potent tech-demonstrator for the API, selling it to the various game developers AMD has built strong developer relations with.

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74 Comments on Mantle Enables Significant Performance Improvement in Battlefield 4: AMD

#1
RCoon
The key words here are "up to".
I will reservedly wait for actual factual benchmarks before I believe this.
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#2
Wile E
Power User
RCoonThe key words here are "up to".
I will reservedly wait for actual factual benchmarks before I believe this.
Ditto RCoon. Ditto.
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#3
john_
RCoonThe key words here are "up to".
I will reservedly wait for actual factual benchmarks before I believe this.
The key word here is "45%". It is way too big even for a marketing lie. I prefer an "up to 45%" in a title like BF4, than a guaranteed "15%", anytime.
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#4
Prima.Vera
"Up to". Can means that you can have 100fps more than a 780 Ti when looking at the floor only. The real performance will be on average fps, let's see how much those are increased in percentages.
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#5
The Quim Reaper
We don't need higher frame rates at the top end, it's minimum frame rates that need to improve...nothings worse than having a smooth running game then entering an area only to see the frame rate plummet down in to the low teens or 20's.

I'd far rather see a 100% guaranteed minimum 30fps, no matter what they put on the screen, than a meaningless 100fps+
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#6
Sempron Guy
45 percent is a huge number. This might be AMD's boldest claim since Bulldozer.
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#7
john_
Prima.Vera"Up to". Can means that you can have 100fps more than a 780 Ti when looking at the floor only. The real performance will be on average fps, let's see how much those are increased in percentages.
I think looking at the floor will give you the less performance improvement. The more performance improvements will come from the most complex scenes where all the disadvantages of DirectX will be there, affecting performance.
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#8
erocker
*
The 45% boost most likely goes to the APU's.
Posted on Reply
#9
Kaynar
The Quim ReaperWe don't need higher frame rates at the top end, it's minimum frame rates that need to improve...nothings worse than having a smooth running game then entering an area only to see the frame rate plummet down in to the low teens or 20's.

I'd far rather see a 100% guaranteed minimum 30fps, no matter what they put on the screen, than a meaningless 100fps+
Exactly. It's most certainly +45% possible max FPS and +0% increase over minimum FPS (eg during an explosion).
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#10
Relayer
btarunrIn what could explain AMD's move to include copies of one of the most GPU-intensive games with its new A-Series APUs, the company revealed that Mantle, its ambitious attempt at a 3D graphics API to rival DirectX and OpenGL, "enables up to 45 percent faster performance" than DirectX in Battlefield 4, the only known game with planned support for Mantle, and one of the most popular PC games of the season. AMD's claims are so tall, that even a 512 stream processor-laden A10-7850K APU could offer acceptable frame-rates at 1080p, while a $299 Radeon R9 280X could run circles around a $650 GeForce GTX 780 Ti at this particular game. If anything, it could help Battlefield 4 become a potent tech-demonstrator for the API, selling it to the various game developers AMD has built strong developer relations with.

You really need to get out more. :p They are claiming 20 titles planned with support for Mantle. The next title planned is Thief in February.
“Thief on PC will also be amongst the first batch of games that support AMD’s new Mantle API for high performance graphics,” said Eidos’ Jean-Normand Bucci, who conducted the interview
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#11
the54thvoid
Intoxicated Moderator
When the reviews are released it would be sensible for a comparison of low, mid and high end CPU paired with low, mid and high end GPU. Would let folk see where the bigger gains will be made.
Posted on Reply
#12
kn00tcn
btarunrBattlefield 4, the only known game with planned support for Mantle
once again, star citizen...
Posted on Reply
#13
bogami
BEAUTIFUL slap to NVIDIA .Nvidia could answer, of course, using the drivers for their Quadro series that bypasses diretx but what will then be sold under quadro support progrm !
Posted on Reply
#14
frankfrankynumberone
kn00tcnonce again, star citizen...
There is even more!

Announced:
Battlefield 4 - DICE/Frostbite Team
Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare - PopCap Games/Frostbite Team
Sniper Elite 3 - Rebellion
Star Citizen - Roberts Space Industries
Thief - Eidos Montreal/Nixxes Software

TBD:
Dragon Age: Inquisition - BioWare/Frostbite Team
Galactic Civilization III - Stardock
Mars (codename) - Mohawk Games/Oxide Games
Mass Effect (untitled) - BioWare/Frostbite Team
Mirror's Edge (untitled) - DICE/Frostbite Team
Need for Speed (untitled) - Ghost Games/Frostbite Team
Star Control - Stardock/Oxide Games
Star Wars: Battlefront - DICE/Frostbite Team
Star Wars (untitled) - Visceral Games/Frostbite Team

Other unannounced titles from EA/SQUARE ENIX/SEGA/(TBD). 20+ titles in development.

That's all for now. But if I know more, than I'll post it.
Posted on Reply
#15
Fluffmeister
Another year, more Powerpoint slides.

Release it already.
Posted on Reply
#17
librin.so.1
I, personally, would love it if they put more effort in their drivers and especially on optimizing their OpenGL[1], which at the moment, unlike on the green team, is Mjr. Balle de Sukke on their drivers. ...And would drop CCC, too. Instead of trying to "win" things over with this Mantle of theirs, which, I believe, can just create more of consumer-unfriendly segregation. And we already have too much of that.

[1] as mainly a Linux user, I care about that a lot.
Posted on Reply
#18
john_
VinskaI, personally, would love it if they put more effort in their drivers and especially on optimizing their OpenGL[1], which at the moment, unlike on the green team, is Mjr. Balle de Sukke on their drivers. ...And would drop CCC, too. Instead of trying to "win" things over with this Mantle of theirs, which, I believe, can just create more of consumer-unfriendly segregation. And we already have too much of that.

[1] as mainly a Linux user, I care about that a lot.
Mantle is necessary for AMD. Going the root of OpenGL only or/and DirectX it is just butter on Nvidia's bread, because as a stronger brand with more cash in hands Nvidia can manipulate the PC gaming market easily. And they proved, in my opinion, that they enjoy to do so. Only now with all the consoles in it's pocket AMD have a strong advantage over Nvidia. It will be stupid not to use it especially when you have a competitor that, whatever it creates, it is proprietary and locked.
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#19
west7
intersting 45% performence improvment is great but we all have to wait for benchmarks
Posted on Reply
#20
mr2009
erockerThe 45% boost most likely goes to the APU's.
if you look at the picture on the bottom, it written there
On AMD A10-7850K APU+ AMD RadeonTM R9 290X Discrete Graphics
so i believe that 45% could mean achievable on R9 290X... correct me if im wrong..
Posted on Reply
#21
Deadlyraver
Either way, the performance is impressive.
Posted on Reply
#22
Octavean
Impressive indeed or potentially,....

They have my interest anyway,....

I've never been one to be AMD (ATI) only or nVidia only. I often switch between the two.
Posted on Reply
#23
Assimilator
I'm interested to know where AMD is getting those numbers from, considering the Mantle version of BF4 isn't even out yet. Maybe they have a beta build of the BF4 Mantle engine that renders to /dev/null.

45% performance improvement*
* under certain conditions including but not limited to: season, time of day, prevailing wind direction, and/or whether the number of atoms in your computer is evenly divisible by 2
Posted on Reply
#24
omnimodis78
The question begs to be asked, if Mantle is the second coming of Christ, won't that basically completely and utterly negate the need for high, heck, even mid-range cards? I don't know, I think Mantle will prove to be more hype than anything else, seeing that shareholders of a company would rather see the cash inflows from selling overpriced expensive cards, than AMD being the white knight in shining armour and actually doing the right thing for gamers (I say that because while I'm an NVIDIA fanboy -it's true- I still think that Mantle would be a step towards the right direction). Boardroom chatter always wins in the end.
Posted on Reply
#25
W1zzard
omnimodis78The question begs to be asked, if Mantle is the second coming of Christ, won't that basically completely and utterly negate the need for high, heck, even mid-range cards? I don't know, I think Mantle will prove to be more hype than anything else, seeing that shareholders of a company would rather see the cash inflows from selling overpriced expensive cards, than AMD being the white knight in shining armour and actually doing the right thing for gamers (I say that because while I'm an NVIDIA fanboy -it's true- I still think that Mantle would be a step towards the right direction). Boardroom chatter always wins in the end.
Look at it like this: Mantle will help to increase your GPU load, if your GPU load is below 100% (limited by CPU/API). It won't do anything if GPU load is already at 100%
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