Battlefield 4 on Kaveri with Mantle – Medium Quality Dedicated GPU

We now move the R9-290X towards an enthusiast class PC. Medium quality settings makes this test utterly CPU bound as you can observe. This is the mighty six-core Core i7 3960X. Will Mantle make any difference whatsoever on the framerate ? Of course it does. Now in the example above we enabled Medium quality settings. Obviously you will not use such settings in an enthusiast class PC ever!, but hang in there with me as this is an example where we deliberately create a CPU limitation with Medium quality settings, and Mantle takes advantage of that. In both resolutions we are 100% CPU bound. And the 200 FPS, that is actually an FPS cap of the game engine it seems.

You would actually see this behavior quite often on high-end Multi-GPU setups even at high or Ultra quality settings.

Let's have a look at how you really game:

Battlefield 4 on Kaveri with Mantle – Ultra Quality on Dedicated GPU

In the last example I have configured our Intel 3960x based PC with settings that you and I use in real life. Ultra quality, and I have enabled 4xAA here. Here we create a much more GPU bound situation and the dynamic quickly changes, still (and I did not expect it TBH) Mantle helps boosting performance as it is responsible for less CPU overhead. And that simply helps, always.

The gains might not be as significant as to when you are CPU limited, but at enthusiast level these bumps in perf remain to be very interesting gains alright. Above is the final example of how I think you guys play the game right now, at this very moment on your PC. Obviously 1440P is 2560x1440 WQHD btw and even there you'll see a good 10% performance increase.

What about image quality ?

One question remains. Are there image quality differences. Time was too short to check it out. But DICE definitely is running a separate codepath on BF4. We still have to look into that.

Knows issues with the current Mantle driver build:

Now I am not too interested in the issues as they will be solved and this is a Beta driver, but it does tell the current state of what current product are actually supported, have a peek.

Press evaluation build: Installing AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta on top of an existing AMD Catalyst revision may cause a system hang. Ensure the provided installation instructions are utilized to avoid this issue.

Intermittent stuttering or stability issues may occur when utilizing Mantle with AMD CrossFire technology in BattleField 4

Mantle performance for the AMD Radeon HD 7000/HD 8000 Series GPUs and AMD Radeon R9 280X and R9 270X GPUs will be optimized for BattleField 4 in future AMD Catalyst releases. These products will see limited gains in BattleField 4 and AMD is currently investigating optimizations for them.

Multi-GPU support under DirectX and Mantle will be added to StarSwarm in a future application patch

Notebooks based on AMD Enduro or PowerXpress technologies are currently not supported by the Mantle codepath in Battlefield 4™

AMD Eyefinity configurations utilizing portrait display orientations are currently not supported by the Mantle codepath in Battlefield 4™

Graphics hardware in the AMD A10-7850K and A10-7700K may override the presence of a discrete GPU under the Mantle codepath in Battlefield 4

AMD testing for the AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta has been concentrated on the following products: AMD Radeon R9 290X, R9 290, R9 280, R9 270, R7 260X, R7 260, HD 7000 Series, HD 8000 Series, A10-7850K and A10-7700K. Future AMD Catalyst™ releases will include full test coverage for all AMD products supported by Mantle.

Concluding

This is an extremely short article as there is just so much to explore with mantle. It will remains to bee very simple though. On high-end PCs with a single graphics card you may see perf increase in the 10% area. On massively CPU limited situations like low/medium quality settings / low resolutions or even Multi-GPU setup, that's where the gain easily can get 30 even 40%. As such Mantle will benefit low-end and mainstream processor based PCs the most. But even at Enthusiast class, it will make a difference.

Let us know what you think about Mantle right here. And please keep in mind, all results in this article are preliminary findings.

Download Mantle compatible Beta driver

Mantle compatible Beta driver Discuss Mantle here

So would we use Mantle ? Sure .. any free gain is a plus in my book. Now then, some more Mantle titles would actually be nice. On the next page a FAQ published by AMD to address some questions you guys might have.