AMD officially launches Mantle, new driver and patches available soon

Scorpus

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AMD's hotly-awaited Mantle API is finally ready for a public unveiling, with new patches and drivers enabling the low-level API going live from today. To start with, anyone wanting to utilize Mantle in a supported game must install the new Catalyst 14.1 beta drivers, which should be available soon (within the next few days) from AMD's download center.

Update #1 (Jan 31): At the last minute AMD identified an installation issue in the Catalyst 14.1 driver that renders it unsuitable for distribution. This delays the entire launch as we haven't been able to run any tests with the beta software yet and public release is also expected to be delayed by at least a few more days. As soon as we can get our hands on the proofed driver, we'll be reporting back with our own benchmarks.

Update #2 (Feb 1): AMD has just gone live with the Catalyst 14.1 Beta drivers, allowing anyone to download, install and test out Mantle on their compatible systems. Click here to pick up the latest beta drivers now, as we continue to test Mantle performance on our test benches. Here are the direct download links: AMD Catalyst Driver 14.1 Beta for Desktop or Notebooks.

Update #3 (Feb 1): We've been testing Mantle drivers with BF4 and after a very frustrating first 36 hours (we got them earlier than the public) we've decided not to pursue a formal test for now. In words of our senior hardware editor, Steve Walton: "BF4 has so many issues with Mantle it is making testing near impossible. StarSwarm seems to work okay though."

From 4 AM EST, gamers will be able to download a Mantle-enabled patch for Battlefield 4 through EA's Origin service. At this stage, Battlefield 4 is the only full game that supports Mantle, although Oxide Games Mantle-enabled 'StarSwarm' demo will be available through Steam later in the day (3 PM EST) for gamers that want to further evaluate Mantle performance on their systems. Another Mantle-enabled title, Thief, will be released in February.

In AMD's primer on Mantle, the company states that the API is "primarily designed to improve performance in scenarios where the CPU is the limiting factor". Mantle makes "less of an impact" in GPU-bound situations, although the API does have "some built-in features to improve GPU-bound performance [...] gains in these cases are largely dependent on how well Mantle features and optimizations are being utilized by the developer."

Data provided from AMD's labs backs up what the company stated. For example, AMD claims that running Battlefield 4 (Ultra settings, 4xAA at 1080p) on an AMD A10-7700K APU plus Radeon R9 290X GPU gives a 41% performance boost when Mantle is enabled. On the other hand, if an Intel Core i7-4960X is used with an R9 290X, the performance boost is only 9.2% when Mantle is enabled.

StarSwarm data shows an even bigger performance improvement when Mantle is enabled on CPU-limited systems: AMD claims a 319% performance boost when running the demo on Extreme settings at 1080p, on their A10-7700K system, after Mantle is enabled. However if you have a high-end Intel CPU and an R7 260X, performance gains are lower, at just 5.1%.

There's a couple of other things to note here. First of all, this is the initial release of Mantle, and AMD says the API will continue to evolve and improve in the months ahead. There's a strong possibility AMD and their game partners will be able to squeeze more out of the API as it improves.

Secondly, Mantle, like a number of AMD launches recently, is geared towards giving a better PC gaming experience to those on lower-end hardware. As our resident hardware reviewer Steve notes, a performance kick for those with uber fast CPUs and GPUs isn't hugely important; whereas a 40+% performance boost on slower hardware could be the difference between a playable and unplayable game.

We'll be posting a full performance breakdown of Mantle in Battlefield 4 and StarSwarm (pictured below) in the coming day or two, so check back soon for more detailed results from AMD's new API.

Aside from Mantle, AMD's Catalyst 14.1 beta drivers introduce 'phase 2' frame-pacing solutions for resolutions higher than 1600p on non-XDMA hardware. This means gamers running dual-GPU HD 7000 series setups, for example, should see less tearing and stuttering when they're gaming on Eyefinity or Ultra HD displays.

Catalyst 14.1 is also the first HSA-enabled GPU driver, allowing the CPU and GPU found in AMD's latest Kaveri APUs to simultaneously access the same memory. At this stage only some applications, such as Libre Office and Corel AfterShot Pro, are supported, but AMD assures us that many more will be supported soon.

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"On the other hand, if an Intel Core i7-4960X is used with an R9 290X, the performance boost is only 9.2% when Mantle is enabled."

Wonder what I can expect with 2600K and crossfire 7970s. 'Only' 9% would still be a substantial gain and put me closer to being able to vsync with 96Hz. Can't wait to try Mantle enabled BF4.
 
You can polish a turd, and it will still be a turd, may be shiny, but definitely no more than a turd
 
The ONLY people with the best CPUs are the people with a new top of the line CPU. Not everyone has a new CPU and not everyone purchases the top of the line CPU. As a result there are many people that will benefit from this. I'm glad you can upgrade to the top of the line CPU ever time they are released. As for me, I keep my systems a lot longer than that.
 
This is awesome. Even with "only" a boost of 9%, I will finally never drop below 60 fps on Battlefield 4 on the largest maps like Paracel Storm. I get about 70-75 fps on Locker, but that is indoors, dark, and dreery.. Paracel Storm is beautiful and well done but I can imagine that it is slowly killing my gpus seeing that they only get 58 fps average.
 
So AMD couldn't compete with Intel in the CPU arena, and now they are intentionally engineering games to be less dependent on the CPU. Talk about an extremely hilarious fix for their inadequacies.

Just what I was thinking, it's quite disappointing AMD just can't compete with Intel on CPU power.
 
Every time I fire up BF4, there are "gigs" of updates..... Today, was no different... 1.3GB update.. I say there are other sections in this update aside from a MANTLE patch...atleast I hope so. To need a 1.3GB update just use MANTLE is a lil' rediculous. On the flip side.. the new 14.1 is not available on AMD Yet as of 10:30am EST. BUT>..... I have been using the "Kaveri" driver, or the 13.30 driver and have noticed a huge difference in Crossfire and FPS in games over all. As well as going from CrossFire to single card, with Non-Kaveri drivers was giving me fits... It had a mind of its own whether it wanted to switch from 2 to 1 card, or vice versa. I have a higher end system, but I Tell ya I hope the new drivers work out. I'm <-> this close to switching to Nvidia cards.
 
"only 10% improvement on an R9-290X"

Do you not realise that that is basically 1, if not 2, generations of graphical power ahead in that case, as the R9-290 is not even 10% more powerful than the 7970 without mantle.

But no, keep sucking on NVidia, and their inflated prices.
 
Wow, it's amazing how some of you naysayers are just plain *****s and I bet don't even understand how Mantle works. All Mantle does at this point is remove the CPU overhead that exists in DirectX and OpenGL, and perhaps slightly improves GPU performance.

This is excellent news for people with low end CPUs and decent GPUs because now they'll see a drastic improvement in FPS. Not only that, but this API also improves your minimum FPS, if you take a closer look at the results in this article...

http://www.techpowerup.com/197396/d...-4-directx-vs-mantle-performance-numbers.html

You'll see that the framerate is also much smoother, so it pretty much eliminates the large frame dips you usually see in games. I think AMD has a winner here.
 
So AMD couldn't compete with Intel in the CPU arena, and now they are intentionally engineering games to be less dependent on the CPU. Talk about an extremely hilarious fix for their inadequacies.

I guess I see it a little differently. AMD's APUs already excel in media and graphics over Intel's IGP solutions. This is a case of AMD leveraging the actual GPU side of their business, and coming up with solutions that leverage the power in GPUs towards taking the load of CPUs. In other words, AMD is coming up with clever technological ways to compete and be relevant. Doesn't seem like an effort that deserves nothing but derision and condescension. At least they are trying.
 
I think there is come mis-communication with what Mantle works with and how much of a performance improvement there is and with what hardware makes these improvements. Mantle makes use of 8 CPU cores and takes some of the weight off the CPU and puts it towards the GPU giving it some nice improvements. It makes use of multi-threading on the CPU to give some nice performance improvements across the board which will make having the 8 Core FX chip. Im curious what this will overall do for me, ill have to give it a try when 14.1 is available on my system.
 
So AMD couldn't compete with Intel in the CPU arena, and now they are intentionally engineering games to be less dependent on the CPU. Talk about an extremely hilarious fix for their inadequacies.

How is AMD supposed to compete with Intel when Intel has an R&D department that employees almost the same amount of people as AMD does company wide?
 
How is AMD supposed to compete with Intel when Intel has an R&D department that employees almost the same amount of people as AMD does company wide?
They compete by releasing ultra high end cards this year that are priced similarly to Nvidia's cards. The R9 series is a huge bang for their buck. I'm glad they stopped trying to match Intel cpu-wise. They focused on their gpu and made huge advancements this year.
 
CPUs are history. The new generation of processors are going to combine the CPU/GPU into a single completely hybrid processing unit, with the cpu cores and gpu cores actively getting scheduled for performing serial, vector, and/or scalar computations in parallel.

In the old CPU model, all the graphics and programming have to be scheduled by the GPU, which means a slower CPU, then a smaller performance of the system.

In any new hybrid processor architecture, the CPU cores runs at maximum speed and the GPU cores run at maximum speed without having to wait for each other. The latter means a new way to write software, which is not CPU centric.

This is the first HSA/hUMA hybrid chip from AMD. This architecture has a hugemongous capability to improve the performance by a magnitude of times in many areas.

Intel does not own high-end GPU technology and only has smaller performance GPUs, so it cannot even use integrated and discrete GPUs to significantly scale the performance.

All new generation of processors, new generation of high-performance software, and high performance graphics will use the HSA/hUMA programming models, AMD, Samsung, Texas Instruments, etc. will all be using this scalable programmable software and all software using it will scale in performance significantly.

If you understand CPU/GPU/APU technology, you will know that what we are looking at here is the first light on a new way to write scalable software and a new way to extract/scale all the CPU/GPU core performance from a chip, by getting rid of all the old CPU based performance bottlenecks..

This is history in the making, and in a couple of years, CPUs will look like dinosaurs..
 
Correcting mistake in:

"In the old CPU model processing system, all the graphics and programming have to be scheduled by/through the CPU, which means a slower overall GPU and CPU performance, which causes a loss in overall processing performance."

CPUs are history. The new generation of processors are going to combine the CPU/GPU into a single completely hybrid processing unit, with the cpu cores and gpu cores actively getting scheduled for performing serial, vector, and/or scalar computations in parallel.

In the old CPU model, all the graphics and programming have to be scheduled by the GPU, which means a slower CPU, then a smaller performance of the system.

In any new hybrid AMD processor architecture, the CPU cores runs at maximum speed and the GPU cores run at maximum speed without having to wait for each other, sharing the same memory, paging, virtual process space, locking, etc. The latter means a new way to write higher performance software, which is not CPU centric.

This is the first HSA/hUMA hybrid chip from AMD. This architecture has a hugemongous capability to improve the performance by a magnitude of times in many areas.

Intel does not own high-end GPU technology and only has smaller performance GPUs, so it cannot even use integrated and discrete GPUs to significantly scale the performance.

All new generation of processors, new generation of high-performance software, and high performance graphics will use the HSA/hUMA programming models, AMD, Samsung, Texas Instruments, etc. will all be using this scalable programmable software and all software using it will scale in performance significantly.

If you understand CPU/GPU/APU technology, you will know that what we are looking at here is the first light on a new way to write scalable software and a new way to extract/scale all the CPU/GPU core performance from a chip, by getting rid of all the old CPU based performance bottlenecks..

This is history in the making, and in a couple of years, CPUs will look like dinosaurs..
 
The hard part is that Mantle requires pretty new AMD CPU/APU's and CGN graphics cards in order to work. That will NOT help the folks who have older systems that could really use the bump in frame rates.
 
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