AMD Catalyst Driver To Enable Mantle, Fix Frame Pacing, Support HSA For Kaveri 71
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."
High end cpu's get little to no boost (Score:4, Interesting)
MaximumPC paints this a little bit different. [maximumpc.com] Where only lower end cpu's get a big boost in conjecture with higher end AMD cards.
I guess we will wait and see with benchmarks later today when 14.1 is released.
This is great news for those like me on older Phenom II 2.6 ghz systems who can afford to upgrade the ram, video card, and to an ssd but not the cpu without a whole damn new system. I use VMWare and this obsolete system has a 6 core cpu and hardware virtualization support. Otherwise I would upgrade but only an icore7 or higher end AMD FX-8350s have the same features for non gaming tasks. I can play Battlefiend 4 on this soon with high settings at 1080p would be great!
AMD strategic... (Score:4, Interesting)
So gamers get a small boost to their gaming rigs, but that's not *really* the goal for AMD.
The real goal is that AMD demonstrably lags Intel in *CPU* performance, but not GPU. OpenGL/Direct3D implementations cause that to matter, meaning AMD's cpu business gets dinged as a valid component in a configuration that will do some gaming. Mantel diminishes the importance of the CPU to most gaming, therefore their weak CPU offering is made workable to sell their APU based systems. It can do so cheaper than Intel+Discrete GPU while still reaping a tidy profit.
R9 290X vs 650 Ti Boost (Score:2, Interesting)
I was really disappointed by the comparative performance of the AMD 290x 4GB vs my nVidia 650 Ti Boost 2GB.
The nVidia let's me run games like Borderlands 2 and Skyrim at max settings on my old Core 2 Duo smoothly, yet the 290X hitches and drags, almost as if it were streaming the gameplay from the hard drive. I expected a card with 2000+ shaders to be faster than that.
If my processor isn't bottlenecking the 650s performance too badly, at least the 290X should be able to cap out at something reasonable.