Testing AMD’s Mantle: Battlefield 4, Thief and PvZ Gard?= en Warfare

[news 28]

 

 

<http://www.eteknix.com>

 

Testing AMD’s Mantle: Battlefield 4, Thief and PvZ Garden Warfare

 

“Mantle is Game Changing†is AMD's tagline for their newest

low-overhead API. Mantle has been in the news constantly since AMD

publicly released the concept on September 26th last year in their

public live stream.

<http://www.eteknix.com/amd-detail-game-changing-mantle-low-level-api-console-like-optimisation/>

 The biggest claim to fame of this new low-overhead API is its use in

EA's Battlefield 4 blockbuster and the support it has from EA's famous

FrostBite 3 Engine. However, what is all the fuss about? How does

Mantle actually perform in practice? Why should you even care about

it? These are questions we are hoping to address today.

 

What's Mantle all about?

 

So we've briefly introduced Mantle as a “thing†but at a basic

technical level, what is Mantle? Mantle is an API, or application

programming interface, that reduces the level of CPU workload required

during gaming. Mantle does this by offloading tasks traditionally done

by the CPU to the GPU and by simplifying the communication between the

two. Compared to DirectX, Mantle uses less CPU capacity for

communication between a video game and its graphics card resources, as

such CPU bottlenecks can be reduced or removed by using the Mantle

API. In short Mantle is an attempt to bring “console-likeâ€Â

optimisations to the desktop PC platform.

 

Who can make use of Mantle?

 

The AMD Mantle API is currently only supported on AMD GCN products:

that's 28nm HD 7000 or Rx 2xx series graphics cards and Kaveri APUs at

the time of writing. For Mantle to work the game must be programmed in

the Mantle API. This is the main reason why AMD is working so hard to

push its API among game developers; it cannot go anywhere without

developer adoption. The Mantle API is currently in the closed beta

stage, but upon release it will be fully open source and made

available to all game developers, hardware vendors and industry

figures.

 

URL -

http://www.eteknix.com/testing-amds-mantle-battlefield-4-thief-and-pvz-garden-warfare/

 

 

 

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