AMD Catalyst Driver To Enable Mantle, Fix Frame Pacing, Support HSA For Kaveri

MojoKid writes "AMD has a new set of drivers coming in a couple of days that are poised to resolve a number of longstanding issues and enable a handful of new features as well, most notably support for Mantle. AMD's new Catalyst 14.1 beta driver is going to be the first publicly available driver from AMD that will support Mantle, AMD's "close to the metal" API that will let developers wring additional performance from GCN-based GPUs. However, the new drivers will also add support for the HSA-related features introduced with the recently released Kaveri APU, and will reportedly fix the frame pacing issues associated with Radeon HD 7000 series CrossFire configurations. A patch for Battlefield 4 is due to arrive soon as well and AMD is claiming performance gains in excess of 40 percent in CPU limited scenarios but smaller gains in GPU-limited conditions, with average gains of 11 — 13 percent over all." First time accepted submitter Spottywot adds some details about the Battlefield 4 improvements, writing that Johan Andersson, one of the Technical Directors in the Frostbite team, says that the best performance gains are observed when a game is bottlenecked by the CPU, "which can be quite common even on high-end machines." "With an AMD A10-7850K 'Kaveri' APU Mantle provides a 14 per cent improvement, on a system with an AMD FX-8350 and Radeon 7970 Mantle provides a 25 per cent boost, while on an Intel Core i7-3970x Extreme system with 2x AMD Radeon R9 290x cards a huge 58 per cent performance increase was observed."

Re:Sounds like a bit of a bust.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that misses the point. CPUs aren't the limiting factor in part because game devs limit the number of draw calls they issue to avoid it being a limiting factor (because not everybody has a high end CPU). Mantle may not offer vastly more performance in the short term, but it will enable more in game engines in the long term if the claims DICE and AMD make are accurate. That doesn't get away from the cost of lock in, but like any new release of this sort Mantle may never catch on but it may push DX and GL to change in a mantle-like direction which does then benefit all developers.