AMD’s low-level graphics API - Mantle - is now fully support by Battlefield 4 as DICE release an update. This means more of your PC’s power is tapped into directly, giving greater performance than DirectX.
Battlefield 4 is already ”quite heavily optimized” for DirectX 11 and 11.1, says DICE, but Mantle has let them ‘significantly reduce CPU cost’ when rendering letting them cut-down overheads.
Basically you get more bang for your buck. This Mantle update has been long in the making and anticipated by AMD users, and is now available with the latest Catalyst drivers.
”Mantle is a new low-level graphics API that we’ve been working very closely with AMD on over the last 2 years and it is a major change & improvement to how we are able to program & use modern GPUs in order to get the most out of them,” explains Johan Andersson, Frostbite team technical director.
”Battlefield 4 on PC is already quite heavily optimized using DirectX 11 and DirectX 11.1, but with Mantle we are able to go even further: we’ve significantly reduced CPU cost in our rendering, efficiently parallelized it over multiple CPU cores and reduced overhead in many areas.”
Mantle support in Battlefield 4 requires:
▪ AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta drivers
▪ AMD Radeon GPU with Graphics Core Next (Note: AMD Catalyst 14.1 initially supports the AMD Radeon R9 290X, R9 290, R7 260X and Kaveri APU)
▪ 64-bit Windows (7, 8 or 8.1)
The in-game options will then offer you a switch between DirectX 11 and Mantle. This is the first iteration of DICE’s Mantle renderer, with promises of future optimisations and improvements down the line.
Check out the Battlelog blog for more on Battlefield 4’s Mantle support.