AMD Mantle Battlefield 4 & Star Swarm Performance and Thoughts
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,286 words · ~6 min read
0:00
mantle in a nutshell is AMD's initiative to create a new programming model to
0:05
fully exploit the capabilities of modern gpus to improve graphics performance
0:10
that's directly from their
0:17
literature The Cooler Master glacer 240l CPU Cooler delivers the convenience of
0:21
an all-in-one and the performance of a custom water cooler click now to learn
0:25
more the idea is to give developers the ability to have their game and interact
0:30
directly with the hardware to reduce unnecessary overhead to take advantage
0:34
of mantle right now you'll need a gcn architecture AMD Radeon graphics card
0:39
with a mantle compatible driver and a mantle ready game at the moment the only
0:44
game commercially available is Battlefield 4 but AMD also has a
0:49
benchmark called star swarm that was built using the oxide engine that you
0:53
can download on Steam now performance with mantle is a bit of a complicated
0:58
story it is supposed to improve performance but it's not that simple so
1:03
I'm going to hand the video over to Luke who has spent the better part of a week
1:07
testing multiple CPU platforms multiple
1:10
graphics cards multiple benchmarking segments within Battlefield 4 and
1:15
generally going on a voyage of discovery about this exciting new technology from
1:20
AMD without further Ado I'll let him take it away the original purpose of
1:24
this video was actually to go on the steam Hardware survey and figure out
1:27
what a lot of people were running and we were then going to Benchmark those cards
1:31
and those setups to figure out what tangible benefit people would get now
1:35
with mantle that didn't really work out so well and I'll get into that more
1:39
later on but for now we'll go into what actually we ended up doing to actually
1:43
get the results that we were hoping to I changed from storming the beach on the Singapore level like I normally do with
1:48
Battlefield 4 benchmarks and went to the broken Flight Deck this is a little bit
1:52
more CPU intensive than the Singapore level is and a better representation of
1:56
mantle and we're trying to find better representations of of mantle in
2:00
Battlefield 4 so it kind of made sense uh the 3960x 290x platform that I was
2:05
running for this performed quite well and with the direct X11 to mantle
2:10
comparison when both of them were overclocked we got about a 133%
2:13
Improvement going to mantle that's very solid for just switching a settings in
2:17
your video settings uh but when we tried something that a few people have been
2:21
trying which is underclocking their CPU to see what kind of performance gains
2:25
they'll get then we moved the 3960x to 2 GHz and saw a 20% of which is a lot more
2:30
solid although I don't see this being that tangible because the availability
2:35
of really high-end powerful CPUs these days is making it so that not that many
2:39
people actually have weak CPUs the the price per performance of CPUs is quite
2:44
solid so most people even in the budget end are coming out with pretty solid
2:47
CPUs far above the 2 GHz range that I set that CPU to so back to the steam
2:52
Hardware survey I ran a ton of different stuff based on the information that we
2:56
got from the steam Hardware server so that went from radon 777s to 7850 to
3:02
797s to r9290 x's and then with CPUs we
3:06
went from 3960x to 4670 K to cavar CPUs
3:11
I had tons of different setups and mixes and stuff going on and that felt as
3:15
random and ridiculous as the results I got from those setups which didn't make
3:19
a ton of sense now I don't know where to throw blame at for this there's a fairly
3:24
new patch from EA for Battlefield there's a new beta driver from AMD
3:30
there's me testing on different levels in Battlefield there's fraps and the
3:35
built-in tool in Battlefield recording the FPS there's tons of different stuff
3:38
going on but either way these results were not properly representative of the
3:42
platform and I know that for sure because there are certain setups that
3:46
should have no matter what been above certain ones that they were not so these
3:49
numbers were not valid and I'm not showing them and hopefully if you're
3:53
watching this in the future all of those things have been resolved and that's why
3:56
I'm not showing them is because if you watch in the future and I show all these
4:00
problems and they're fixed then it's not very well applicable another thing to
4:04
note if you're running these benchmarks on your own the best results are shown
4:07
on gcn 1.1 that is the 290 series The
4:11
260 series and the 7790 uh if you are running on gcn 1.0
4:16
that's say the 7,000 series graphics cards uh you Mantle still works fine
4:21
you'll still still see improvements in especially the very specialized situations like starstorm which we'll
4:25
talk about later but it won't be quite as nice as the improvements you'll see
4:29
on gcn 1.1 another thing to note might be that Battlefield 4 isn't actually in
4:34
my opinion the best representation of mantle to really show mantle off you
4:39
need a lot more CPU horsepower under there pushing the CPU as hard as you
4:43
possibly can and with that enter star
4:47
swarm star swarm is an entirely another Beast this thing will punish your CPU as
4:52
much as it possibly can and that's perfect to show off mantle so we tried
4:56
this out in a ton of different ways and you can see in every different way I
5:00
tried it out the simple switch over to mantle just completely destroyed it in a
5:05
way that is speaks more than just the
5:10
numbers this can actually unlock different types of games people can
5:13
start developing things for manle that they weren't able to develop before
5:17
maybe it's still an RTS but it's on a completely different level because each
5:21
individual guy can have their own very highly Advanced Ai and you can have
5:26
thousands of these little individual guys imagine playing an RTS with there's
5:31
some of them out there but with thousands of little minions but having them all be very Advanced AI That's
5:37
something interesting to think about we even have games coming up in the near
5:40
future that are already planned that can take huge advantage of mantle like Star
5:44
Citizen there's going to be huge amounts of ships in one small area with AI
5:49
controlled turrets with AI Manning different systems within your ship that
5:53
is in this giant system and it's going to be nuts there's projectiles going to
5:57
be flying all over the place and mantle will definitely help there as always
6:01
check out the sticky under the PC gaming section on the Forum join the organization we're currently in third
6:05
place for total members and we're getting close to Second so be sure to
6:09
join and just are you excited for this
6:13
type of thing are you excited for mantle are you excited for the games that will
6:16
be able to come out with mantel are you excited for the performance that mantle
6:19
can unlock for you comment down below as always like and dislike the video
6:24
depending on your mood and subscribe to lonus techtips to see all of our other
6:29
awesome some
6:52
content