Home Gaming Battlefield 4’s Mantle update is out

Battlefield 4’s Mantle update is out

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BF4

If you’ve been patiently waiting for the new update for Battlefield 4 that enables it to use that fancy new Mantle API that AMD’s been harping on about, your wait is over. Unfortunately, the driver from AMD isn’t. So wait some more.

“The new game update for Battlefield 4 brings the Mantle renderer that DICE has developed in conjunction with AMD. With this first release of Mantle, you can expect performance increases in the game if you have the hardware to support it.” says DICE on the Battlelog blog.

To enable Mantle, you’ll have to follow  a few steps, which are outlined here:

In order to use Mantle you will need the following:

  • AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta drivers. AMD will post them here.
  • AMD Radeon GPU with Graphics Core Next
    • Note: AMD Catalyst™ 14.1 initially supports the AMD Radeon™ R9 290X, R9 290, R7 260X and “Kaveri” APU
  • 64-bit Windows (7, 8 or 8.1)

If you have the above you will see a new “Graphics API” option in the in-game Graphics Options settings after starting the game, here you can switch between using DirectX 11 and Mantle (remember to restart the game after changing).

It looks like you’re going to need a new AMD card or a Kaveri APU to take advantage of it right now. Mostly, Mantle will help eliminate the performance drops you get when there’s a CPU bottleneck, so those of you with perfectly tuned systems might not see one iota’s difference. For others, you could end up seeing as much as a 45% increase in performance.

If you manage to get Mantle running (once AMD’s drivers are available) do let us know if you notice any significant performance. Those of you patiently waiting for the damned game to work properly, well, you’ll just have to wait a little longer. 

Last Updated: January 30, 2014

8 Comments

  1. Rags

    January 30, 2014 at 12:51

    Still skeptical about mantel. May help the shitty AMD cpus. But with high end Intel CPU and Radeon combo, I doubt we will see figures more than what is commonly claimed in new driver releases of both AMD and Nvidia. My money is on ~5%

    Reply

    • Exalted Overlord Geoffrey Tim

      January 30, 2014 at 12:59

      I agree completely. I don’t think it’s going to help much on the high end. It’ll help a bunch on lowe tomid range systems.

      Reply

      • Kerrits

        January 30, 2014 at 13:22

        It will be interesting to see if DICE’s claims can be independently verified.

        From the link in the article:
        Test case 3: High-end single-player with multiple GPUs
        CPU: Intel Core i7-3970x Extreme, 12 logical cores @ 3.5 GHz
        GPU: 2x AMD Radeon R9 290x 4 GB
        Settings: 1080p ULTRA 4x MSAA
        OS: Windows 8 64-bit
        Level: South China Sea “Broken Flight Deck”
        This single-player scene is heavy on both the CPU and GPU with lots of action going on. Test was done on the highest end Intel CPU on Windows 8, which is the fastest option before Mantle thanks to DirectX 11.1. Still this CPU is not fast enough to keep the 2 290x GPUs fed at 1080p on Ultra settings so we get a significant CPU performance bottleneck which results in major performance improvement when enabling Mantle.
        Result: 13.24 ms/f -> = 8.38 ms/f = 58% faster

        Reply

      • ElimiNathan

        January 30, 2014 at 13:28

        Either way it will prolong the lifespan of your high end PC, especially if more and more games come out with Mantle support

        Reply

  2. FoxOneZA

    January 30, 2014 at 13:47

    I’ve being getting 25-30% performance increase using D3Overdriver which puts my Nvidia card right up there with AMS’s latest offering but I’m still intrigued to see if a Mantle run R7 260x can do BF4 at 1080p/60fps with settings on high-ultra.

    Reply

    • ElimiNathan

      January 30, 2014 at 15:56

      My R9 290 does 😛

      Reply

      • Kromas

        January 31, 2014 at 08:41

        As does my R9 290x .:P

        Reply

  3. Laby

    January 30, 2014 at 15:18

    This sucks lol now I have to upgrade T_T

    Reply

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