What is happening with the Battlefield 4 Mantle patch EA promised before the end of the year? In short it won’t be out today or tomorrow, it is delayed until January for a pretty good reason.

EA spokespeople told SemiAccurate that the Mantle patch was still on and still full steam ahead, although sadly not on Steam, and will be out in January. The full statement from them is as follows:

“After much consideration, the decision was made to delay the Mantle patch for Battlefield 4. AMD continues to support DICE on the public introduction of Mantle, and we are tremendously excited about the coming release for Battlefield 4! We are now targeting a January release and will have more information to share in the New Year.”

Unofficial word from EA sources say that the bug fixes for BF4 is taking more time than expected, and that is a higher priority than the Mantle patch. This makes complete sense, and good for EA in deciding to fix what they have sold instead of pushing shiny new stuff. While we would prefer to see the performance increase from a Mantle based engine, it is much better to have a base stable game first. SemiAccurate does expect the Mantle engine version to be demo’d all over the place at CES next week though, stay tuned.S|A

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