14 DAY TRIAL // Battlefield 4 finally has support for AMD's Mantle API, thanks to the latest update for the PC edition of the game, and DICE has just offered some details about the new tech and how it can be used to improve the game's performance.
AMD surprised quite a few people last year when it revealed Mantle, a new type of API that's similar to Microsoft's DirectX, for example, but is designed to improve the performance of games when running on underpowered CPUs.
Now, Battlefield 4 has finally received support for the new tech, thanks to the latest update that went live earlier this week.
"Battlefield 4 on PC is already quite heavily optimized using DirectX 11 and DirectX 11.1, but with Mantle we are able to go even further: we’ve significantly reduced CPU cost in our rendering, efficiently parallelized it over multiple CPU cores and reduced overhead in many areas," DICE's Johan Andersson said on Battlelog.
The new technology will allow Battlefield 4 to run even faster on a wide variety of computers that are using a recent AMD graphics cards.
"The biggest performance gains can be seen when the game is bottlenecked by the CPU which can be quite common even on high-end machines and this was main goal to improve on with Mantle. We’ve also been able to streamline and optimize some of the GPU workload," Andersson added.
"The end result is that game performance is improved in virtually all scenarios in Battlefield 4 on both Windows 7 and Windows 8 when running with Mantle!"
Bear in mind, however, that in order to use the new Mantle tech, you need to have a few things already in place, in the form of: -AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta drivers -AMD Radeon GPU with Graphics Core Next -64-bit Windows (7, 8 or 8.1)
Once you have these things, Battlefield 4's in-game Graphics Options screen will have a new section called Graphics API, which can be changed from DirectX 11 to Mantle (a restart is needed to apply the change). After this, a boost in performance should appear, depending on your computer.