Although the rumor of the Battlefield 4 Mantle patch delay has caused some serious confusion, it was luckly not true as DICE has lived up to its promise and released the aforementioned patch today. Of course, we still need the AMD Catalyst 14.1 beta drivers which should be available shortly.

According to DICE own tests, the Battlefield 4 game with Mantle patch will bring some impressive performance improvements of up to 58 per cent, depending on the actual configuration. To make things interesting, the most impressive performance improvement comes when two R9 290X graphics cards are paired up with Intel's Core i7-3970X Extreme CPU while AMD's FX-8350 and HD 7970 yield about 25 per cent boost.

According to Johan Andersson, the Technical Director at Frostbite, "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." According to Andersson, in most scenarios, the game is bottlenecked by the CPU performance.

In case you are interested, you will have to download the 1.23GB heavy patch, which also brings some other game stability improvements, gameplay balance adjustments and tweak, from Origin PC client and wait for AMD to release the AMD Catalyst 14.1 beta driver. Of course, bear in mind that only AMD Radeon R9 290X, R9 290, R7 260X graphics cards and Kaveri APU (according to EA/DICE) will work with Mantle API.

In any case, we should have more details once AMD releases the new beta driver.





Source: Battlelog.Battlefield.com.