AMD Mantle boosts Battlefield 4 performance by 45 per cent

by Mark Tyson on 9 January 2014, 10:43

Tags: AMD (NYSE:AMD), NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

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AMD has boasted of very impressive performance figures which can be achieved thanks to its recently introduced Mantle API. Also the chipmaker revealed that three major game engines are being adapted with Mantle optimisations and around 20 games are now in development to make the most of your AMD hardware thanks to Mantle. AMD also showed for the first time an open, non-proprietary competitor for Nvidia's G-SYNC monitor technology.

Mantle games

AMD first detailed Mantle when the Radeon R9 and R7 series graphics cards were launched in Hawaii near the end of September. In November we heard about three major games developers coming on board to optimise their games for AMD hardware via Mantle and at CES we have had an update to these numbers and began to see the potential of the application of Mantle technology.

Now we know that three game engines support Mantle so far, these are; the Asura Engine, the Frostbite 3 Engine, and the Nitrous Engine. Upcoming games that will utilise Mantle include Battlefield 4, Thief, Star Citizen and Sniper Elite 3. AMD says in all there are about 20 games in development right now that are being optimised for Mantle.

In AMD's CES presentation the game Battlefield 4 was shown to be running up to 45 per cent faster thanks to the new development API. The Battlefield 4 update which is Mantle enhanced will be out later this month.

AMD FreeSync

Several companies have shown off Nvidia G-SYNC enabled monitors at the CES this year. Nvidia's monitor side feature helps make your gameplay even smoother by synchronising the monitor refresh rate to the graphics card output but requires an Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost or better.

AMD's FreeSync is a competitive technology that "doesn't require specialized hardware, or licenses to the display makers," reports TechPowerUp. FreeSync uses dynamic refresh rates that have been supported by the last three generations of AMD GPUs, it requires variable VBLANK timing which is a proposed addition to the VESA spec, which is already present in many modern displays.

AMD Catalyst drivers are said to already support dynamic refresh on supported displays but Nvidia needed the external hardware to implement this feature. However the Nvidia tech will "have an edge with its output quality," an AMD exec has reportedly confessed. The main difference is that as AMD's implementation is all computer host side so there is a bit more processing to do for your machine.

This week AMD demoed FreeSync on Toshiba laptops at the CES and a whitepaper filling us in on the finer details will be forthcoming. AnandTech had a look at a demo of the FreeSync technology and concluded the technology could "be a big win for AMD’s APUs," including those in the Xbox One and PS4.



HEXUS Forums :: 44 Comments

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Problem for anyone who is not called AMD is that MANTLE will also be used on console games too, it's as close as direct to metal communications can get I suspect, free from the hindrance of backwards compatibility and associated bloated API's required to do that, 45% performance increase is outstanding.

Impressive as it is, I am not convinced Freesync is all it's cracked up to be, if it could of been made workable with just software it would make no sense for a hardware solution and the manufacturers would not of spent all that money to include it in their monitor offerings.
+45% is HUGE. I was expecting a 25% on paper and a 10-15% in real life.
It says up to 45 per cent faster which could mean anything - e.g. max frame rate up 45% but min frame rate the same and average frame rate close to the same
Is this just on amd gpus? or does it scale on amd cpus as well? I can't see how it would since its already pretty well threaded, but I can hope
maverik-sg1
Problem for anyone who is not called AMD is that MANTLE will also be used on console games too, it's as close as direct to metal communications can get I suspect, free from the hindrance of backwards compatibility and associated bloated API's required to do that, 45% performance increase is outstanding.
nope, not yet at least both MS and Sony have stated that there are not planning on using Mantle.