AMD’s Mantle patch for Battlefield 4 has arrived at last. This is the first release of Mantle, AMD’s low-level high performance graphics API that was announced back in September.
The API allows developers to ‘speak the native language’ of AMD’s Graphics Core Next architecture, which is present in modern AMD GPUs and APUs. The end result is improved visuals and rendering. Mantle actually enables increased draw calls per second by reducing CPU overhead and AMD is promising performance increase over Direct3D and OpenGL and less frequent FPS drops, micro stuttering and texture corruption.
AMD originally planned to launch Mantle in December, but at the last minute, the release was pushed to January. It’s worth noting that you’ll need AMD’s Catalyst 14.1 beta drivers before you can get a load of Mantle’s optimizations and those aren’t actually out yet. AMD was supposed to post them online today, but that hasn’t happened yet and when we talked to an AMD rep, they didn’t have any update on when we might expect them. In other words, sit tight.In the mean time, you can check out the Battlefield Battle Log for some performance test results.
