Mantle Enables Significant Performance Improvement in Battlefield 4: AMD

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.