Nvidia fans are no doubt nursing their future purchase of a Gsync monitor this morning, as they watch on while AMD users get their first taste of the Mantle API with the latest BF4 patch, and man does it taste good.
It's taken a while to get to this stage, with over two years of cooperation between BF4 developer DICE and AMD to create a new renderer that could work with the Mantle API instead of Microsoft's DirectX. Before these real world results, it was postulated that it could deliver up to nine times the cell draw rate that Direct3D could, with other more minor improvements thanks to a much deeper access to the GPU. It turns out those theories do equate to very noticeable performance improvements.
While gains are totally dependent on the hardware you actually have, some people are reporting performance jumps by as much as 45 per cent.
CPU bottlenecked games stand to gain the most benefit by using Mantle, since it can offload a lot more of the instructions to the GPU itself.
"We’ve also been able to streamline and optimize some of the GPU workload, " said Battlefield technical director Johan Andersson. The end result is that game performance is improved in virtually all scenarios in Battlefield 4 on both Windows 7 and Windows 8 when running with Mantle."
To have a play with Mantle yourself, you'll need to download the latest AMD Catalyst 1.41 beta drivers, have a Graphics Core Next GPU (R7 or R9 series at the moment, 7 series isn't supported) and a 64bit operating system, whether Windows 7, 8 or 8.1.
Once you have all that in place, just enable the Graphics API option in the options menu and you're off and running.
Any of you giving this a go today? If so, let us know if you see any dramatic performance improvements.