Tuesday, January 14th 2014
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.
74 Comments on Mantle Enables Significant Performance Improvement in Battlefield 4: AMD
I think if you have 1080p and a R9 280X Mantle is nothing new or impressive, because it will give you those "use less 100FPS", but if you have 1080p and a 7770, or you get a brand new Kaveri APU, your going to see the biggest improvement. 21FPS + 45% = playable, awesome!
High resolution (say 1080p) with weak GPUs (7700 series or R7 series or APU) = not much performance improvement because weaker GPUs already used close to its full potential (already in high GPU usage state).
Meanwhile with 1080p (or lower) and a powerful or even overkill GPUs (7900 series or R9 280/290 series or CF setup) chances are you'll running in medium or even low GPU usage in most games. This is where Mantle could help, increasing your GPU usage as close as possible to 100% = much more performance improvement.
BTW, I'm using W1zzard's logic here : Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Actually, from a conversation I had with a friend recently:
2. The 45% isn't 45% to all setups. It's 45% for an APU setup. Mainly, this is with the Kaveri APU. There could be a possibility it will be less than 45% with Richland or below. Also, there's a possibility that it could be higher with bulldozer, Haswell, Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Ivy Bride-E, Haswell-E, etc...
The Starswarm Demo showed the game without AMD Mantle, running at roughly 20 ms per frame, or 49.99 FPS. With AMD Mantle, the demo was running at 2 to 6 ms, or roughly around 200 FPS.
If you watch the following video, I believe there is some accuracy to this to an extent. It could be fake. Who knows for sure at this current time.
I suspect there is a group of people who are testing the AMD Mantle Beta Version with BF4, and this person is one of them. Take into account, when you watch this, towards the end of the video, this person is using GPU-Z. He hints two things. One, I believe he is using a Haswell setup. GPU-Z shows the integrated Intel Graphics 4000. Two, he's got a R9 series for his Discrete Graphic Card. Since Haswell has 4 cores at a higher Core Frequency, it's possible that FPS performance will go up based on the amount of cores your CPU has, and it's core frequency.
Since AMD Mantle requires a driver on the users end, the person in the video enabled the AMD Mantle in the AMD Catalyst Client. So, in my opinion, it's looking less fake.
If 45% is what AMD Mantle offers at 162 to 200 FPS, then the Kavari APU alone is pushing somewhere around 113 FPS without AMD Mantle. From the video, 300 FPS to 400 FPS is more than twice. Now if you increase the amount of cores on the CPU, this 45% will probably start to show some form of diminishing returns, but the FPS will go up higher. Why is that. Well for a start, AMD Mantle, for a lack of a better term, redirects commands through the other cores for the GPU. Thus, reducing the CPU Bottleneck occurring at the first core.
What's the point in having such a high FPS. If you look at it in context when benchmarking "Video Graphic Cards," high FPS performance versus Game-A, B, C, D, etc, is the x-factor. If AMD can provide their products with AMD Mantle, they can push higher fps for top-selling, PC Games. Higher fps equates to higher popularity versus brand B Graphic Card, and revenue returns go up as consumers purchase "higher-performing" products. Marketing of Graphic Cards are heavily dependent on third party benchers like Techpowerup.com...
Mantle will be out by the end of the month. Yes they have delayed it from last month, but shit happens, YES even in the tech world where we don't get what we are promised. (Mommy, if I'm good, can I go to the arcade? Yes honey, sure.....)
The whole fiasco with BF4 being a technical mess is obvious and it has halted the progress of AMD implementing Mantle in a timely fashion. It looks like EA/DICE has been hard at work fixing up BF4 good and proper and as such I think once they feel it is on par with their and our expectations, Mantle will be ready to go.
I don't care if gains won't be exactly 45%, i still know they will be huge knowing the performance of other such API's. I still have great memories of S3 Metal that turned my poor S3 Savage3D into something that could compete with RivaTNT2 running D3D back then. It was crazy playing all the Unreal Engine based games with insane framerates just because of that API.
Now that i think, maybe someone might write a Mantle API for older Unreal games :D Imagine UT99 with 50000 fps :D
Btw, anyone remembers Witcher 3 with the Uber Sampling version? Try that with 8xAA on a 1080p ;)
Cheers.
so umm, with all the people here who are acting like experts on mantle, why has no one pointed out the obvious?
we wont get faster FPS oh high end systems, its systems with an 'average' or weak CPU that see the greatest gains.
pair a 290x with a 'slow', multi core CPU and you'll see the greatest gains.