Just a few hours ago, the Technical Director for Frostbite Team announced that the latest Battlefield 4 update on PC includes the long-awaited new renderer in Frostbite that is using AMD’s Mantle.
Here’s what we can expect from the Mantle API (taken from the said announcement)
Pretty cool, right?
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 (learn more))
-64-bit Windows (7, 8 or 8.1)
What is Mantle?
*Image from AMD presentation.
Mantle is AMD’s low-level API solution that aims to negate some of the performance overhead of higher-level APIs (DirectX and OpenGL). AMD has touted it as “bare metal†programming, where developers will have unparalleled response times from the GPU to render graphics faster. Overall, the goals include reducing the overhead of processing commands, adding control of the command buffer, reducing the shader compilation overhead, and perhaps best of all, properly scale to multiple CPU cores.
AMD stresses that Mantle works best when a game is CPU-bound, not GPU-bound – if a game is GPU-bound, it tends to stress the card to such a degree that Mantle-like optimizations will not help much at all. That said, those who will see the best benefit of Mantle will have modest PCs – something we’ll see evidenced in the results below.
Summary above from techgage.
