14 DAY TRIAL // AMD has finally made the official introduction of the Mantle API today, the alternative to DirectX and OpenGL that promises game performance boosts of up to 45% in some titles, but it turns out that only a few graphics cards support it.
As discovered just recently, the only GPUs that can run Battlefield 3 and Star Swarm in Mantle are the Radeon R9 290X, R9 290 (non-X), R7 260X, and A-Series "Kaveri" APU-integrated R7 200 graphics.
I'd so far expected all GCN graphics to support it, but no such luck. My sympathy goes to all owners of R9 280X, R9 270X and all those other AMD video boards out there. Hopefully, AMD will change this soon.
It's really ironic, though, that this is the case. After all, Mantle was supposed to improve performance best on mid-range systems, not high-end ones like this. Then again, that applied more to the CPU than the GPU.