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The first release of the Mantle renderer – developed by DICE in conjunction with AMD – is now available to download for Battlefield 4, DICE has announced.
“Mantle is a new low-level graphics API that we’ve been working very closely with AMD on over the last 2 years and it is a major change & improvement to how we are able to program & use modern GPUs in order to get the most out of them,” explaines Johan Andersson, Frostbite team technical director.
“Battlefield 4 on PC is already quite heavily optimized using DirectX 11 and DirectX 11.1, but with Mantle we are able to go even further: we’ve significantly reduced CPU cost in our rendering, efficiently parallelized it over multiple CPU cores and reduced overhead in many areas.”
He adds: “The biggest performance gains can be seen when the game is bottlenecked by the CPU which can be quite common even on high-end machines and this was main goal to improve on with Mantle. We’ve also been able to streamline and optimize some of the GPU workload. 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!”
In order to make use of Mantle you’ll need the following:
-AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta drivers
-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 meet this criteria you’ll spot a new Graphics API option in the in-game Graphics Options settings, from which you can switch between DX11 and Mantle.
Remember that this is the first release of DICE’s Mantle renderer, and there’s the promise of further improvements in future releases, including multi-GPU frame pacing and a few additional GPU performance and memory optimizations.
Source: Battlelog
