Battlefield 4 Mantle Beta for AMD GCN Cards (Fullscreen Pics inside)

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AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta Driver for Windows

AMD's Mantle is a groundbreaking graphics API that promises to transform the world of game development to help bring better, faster games to the PC. The idea is that Direct X is not the most efficient way to utilise the graphics power of modern day PCs. AMD have developed this API with help from DICE and Battlefield 4 is the first AAA game to get the Mantle treatment. Mantle is currently in Beta with no info on a final release schedule.

WARNING

From AMD: Current driver MUST be uninstalled before updating to AMD Catalyst™ 14.1 Beta driver.

Known Issues

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[*]Mantle performance for the AMD Radeon™ HD 7000/HD 8000 Series GPUs and AMD Radeon™ R9 280X and R9 270X GPUs will be optimized for BattleField 4™ in future AMD Catalyst™ releases. These products will see limited gains in BattleField 4™ and AMD is currently investigating optimizations for them.
[*]Multi-GPU support under DirectX® and Mantle will be added to StarSwarm in a future application patch
[*]Intermittent stuttering or stability issues may occur when utilizing Mantle with AMD CrossFire™ technology in BattleField 4™ - AMD recommends using the DirectX code path when playing Battlefield 4 with multiple GPUs. A future AMD Catalyst release will resolve these issues
[*]Notebooks based on AMD Enduro or PowerXpress™ technologies are currently not supported by the Mantle codepath in Battlefield 4™
[*]AMD Eyefinity configurations utilizing portrait display orientations are currently not supported by the Mantle codepath in Battlefield 4™
[*]AMD Eyefinity technology is not currently supported in the Star Swarm​ application
[*]AMD testing for the AMD Catalyst™ 14.1 Beta Mantle driver has been concentrated on the following products: AMD Radeon™ R9 290X, R9 290, R9 280, R9 270, R7 260X, R7 260, HD 7000 Series, HD 8000 Series, A10-7850K and A10-7700K. Future AMD Catalyst™ releases will include full test coverage for all AMD products supported by Mantle.
[*]Graphics hardware in the AMD A10-7850K and A10-7700K may override the presence of a discrete GPU under the Mantle code path in Battlefield 4™
[*]Frame Pacing for Dual Graphics and non-XDMA configurations above 2560x1600 do not currently work with Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4. An upcoming release will enable support
[*]DX9 Dual graphics is not supported in AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta. An upcoming release will enable support
[/LIST]

If you are going to use Mantle you will have to disable your onboard VGA

Mantle will appear as a render option in BF4 Video settings. If you change between Mantle or DirectX you will have to reload the level to see the difference in API used.

From Reddit: PERFORMANCE TOOLS
To simplify measuring performance in the game we’ve added a new tool to the in-game console to record frame times for later analysis. Simply run PerfOverlay.FrameFileLogEnable 1 to start saving frame times and PerfOverlay.FrameFileLogEnable 0 to stop. The resulting .csv file will be located in Documents/Battlefield 4 which can be opened & graphed by Excel or other applications for viewing.
Another in-game tool that is useful to use is Render.DrawScreenInfo 1 that will now show additional on-screen information about your CPU & GPU config, resolution and as well as if Mantle or DirectX 11 is used for rendering.

For example, the path for my excel file is here: C:\Users\soco\Documents\Battlefield 4

My Mantle Results

System Specifications
Operating System

Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit

CPU

Intel Core i7 4930K @ 4.09GHz

RAM

8.00GB DDR3 1600Mhz

Motherboard

Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. X79-UD3

Graphics

6144MB ATI AMD Radeon HD 7990 Series

Monitor

Acer GD245HQ

Game set-up
I logged onto a 60+ player server of Siege of Shanghai
I started in the US spawn and I walked to A control point

Video settings using Catalyst 13.12


Video settings using Catalyst 14.1 with Direct X


Video settings using Catalyst 14.1 with Mantle


Frame Log File Graph

RED: 13.12 DirectX, GREEN: 14.1 DirectX, BLUE: 14.1 Mantle, Milliseconds on the left
(lower is better)
8.3ms flat constantly is 120hz , the sample is 7600 frames

FPS
Average FPS is greatly increased, in Mantle I average 153fps, this is up from an average of 112fps using the 13.12 and DirectX 11. That is a 37% increase.
I set the GameTime.MaxVariableFps to 120 and it was perfect

There are large frame rate drops. They are not frequent but the FPS drops down sharply , sometimes down to 5fps for a second, these are annoying but considering I can now play 120fps/120hz stable, it is silky smooth. Mantle is a winner here for me and hopefully future games can take advantage of this new API. This would give older PCs a new lease of life or give high end PCs greater scope for streaming/recording gameplay.

jonski

My experience is no where near as detailed .

Win 7 , HD7870 , AMD FX-8350 , 8 GB Ram AMD Catalyst™ 14.1 Beta driver

I changed none of my settings from what I had them at before 14.1 , in Direct X is runs fine and feels smooth with no obvious slow downs bar when that building comes down on the Resort map and thats only a relatively new problem for me . In Mantle , it looks lovely , more shiny or something but it plays badly , lots of stuttering . I left it on for 2 maps and then during the 3rd I had to change it back to Direct X .

Cuddlesworth

7870 and X5650. Higher overall fps, huge fps drops all over the place. Makes it unplayable.

TerrorFirmer

4670K and R9 290. Unplayable. Using Mantle the framerate is a total mess, averaging about 40fps, hitting as low as 12, and with DX it's still way lower than it was with 13.12 (but miles ahead of Mantle).

Waste of time, back to 13.12.