Testing AMD’s Mantle

Battlefield 4

“Battlefield 4 is coming to PC, powered by the advanced technology of DICE’s proprietary Frostbite 3 engine. Blur the line between game and glory in Battlefield 4. With dynamic destructable environments, vehicular combat, and the chaos of all-out-war with 64 players, Battlefield 4 on PC will be an unmatched interactive experience. In addition to its hallmark multiplayer, Battlefield 4 features an intense, dramatic character-driven campaign that starts with the evacuation of American VIPs from Shanghai and follows your squad’s struggle to find its way home. There is no comparison. Immerse yourself in the glorious chaos of all-out war, found only in Battlefield.” From Battlefield.com

In Battlefield 4 we did a 5 minute loop of the test range, we tried to make the loops as repetitive as possible to keep things accurate but please consider Battlefield 4 has no official benchmark tool so there is more margin of error than usual. To record frame-rates in DX11 mode we used the Fraps benchmark tool, to record in Mantle mode we used Battlefield 4’s built in FPS counter. Sadly this doesn’t give minimum or maximum frame-rates, it is only possible to figure out the average. To start the frame rate tracking in Battlefield 4 you need to enter PerfOverlay.drawfps 1 into the console and then PerfOverlay.drawfps 0 to end frame tracking. You can also enter render.drawscreeninfo 1 into the console to double check which API is being used to render. Battlefield 4 outputs a csv file document into the Battlefield 4 MyGames folder which lists all the frames and the frame duration. From that list you can calculate the average frame rate. We used the Ultra preset without V-Sync at 1920 x 1080 to test.

As our results show the move from DX11 to Mantle made dramatic improvements for both CPUs. The FX 4100 and FX 8350 saw frame rate rises of around 12 FPS which is a very nice gain. The results suggest that even with the assistance of the Mantle API Battlefield 4 is still CPU limited. However, the results are hugely promising, the FX 4100 with Mantle performs the same as the FX 8350 with DX11!