Final Thoughts
I think it is fair to say our results with Mantle have been highly impressive. Using an XFX R9 290X GPU paired with a low-end CPU (the FX-4100) and a high-end CPU (the FX-8350) we’ve been able to produce sizeable gains in performance on both:
- In Battlefield 4 Mantle produced a 13.6% boost in average frame-rate for the FX-8350 and a 17.3% boost for the FX-4100
- In Plants Vs Zombies Garden Warfare Mantle produced a 29.2% boost in average frame-rate for the FX-8350 and a 42.7% boost for the FX-4100
- In Thief Mantle produced a 28.8% boost in average frame-rate for the FX-8350 and a 37.6% boost for the FX-4100
The trend among our results seems to be that the “lower-end” the CPU is, the larger the gains in frame-rate are. This is great news for the majority of the PC Gaming market because most people use fairly low-end CPUs rather than high-end ones. Gamers rocking processors like dual core Intel Pentiums, quad core AMD Athlons or quad core AMD FX processors will be able to get significant gains in performance by opting for the Mantle API in Mantle-ready game titles. From what I could see there isn’t really a down-side to Mantle. In short it offers up extra performance for nothing, simply by changing an option in one of your games.
The future for Mantle is very bright, even if Mantle itself may not be part of the future. Mantle isn’t just an API, it’s a path of progress and development for the PC gaming industry. Some may say the move to a low-overhead API was a selfish move by AMD, done to give them bragging rights on the first low-overhead API or done to ensure that their CPUs can better compete with Intel’s CPUs in gaming. However, selfishly done or not, the Mantle concept will benefit everyone. We’ve all seen the progress that’s been made with GPUs over the last few years – it has been immense. Compare the GTX 580 to the GTX 780, or the HD 6970 to the R9 290X to get an idea of what I mean – performance has more or less doubled. Has the same progress been made with CPUs? No not really. Compare the Core i7 2600K to the Core i7 4770K and you’ll notice a 10-20% difference at best. That said the future of improved gaming experiences lays with GPUs, not CPUs, and so a low-overhead API makes sense for everyone: game developers, hardware vendors and consumers.
Whether Mantle survives the future is another whole other debate. The key determinant to this will be seeing what happens when DirectX 12 hits the market, AMD are in a rather disadvantageous position compared to Microsoft for a number of reasons, and so it seems more likely that DirectX 12 will phase out Mantle, rather than Mantle beating DirectX 12 or both of them coexisting. AMD represent competition to Intel and Nvidia, whereas Microsoft do not, AMD do not have the deep pockets a huge corporation like Microsoft have. AMD do not have the long history of API development that Microsoft also have, neither do AMD have the deep knowledge and understanding of Windows operating systems like Microsoft have. Furthermore, Microsoft are big game developers, they have a significant game developing and publishing division active in both the PC and console markets, if anyone is going to get a graphics API right, it surely is going to be Microsoft. However, even with all that said, DirectX 12 might as well be called “DirectX 12: Inspired By Mantle”. AMD’s Mantle is a ground-breaking concept that works in practice, I just wish more games would support low-overhead APIs like Mantle.
Thank you to AMD for providing the games that made this content possible.
How about with core i3 or Pentium Anniversary edition with mantle? i wonder how much gain they can get…
well you will get a small performance boost, but mantle is most efficent with AMD gear. I remember i saw some video (linustechtips) where they compared AMD some 4k or something APU series and a R9 2xx and some intel i7 i think it was with a r9 2xx and the AMD combo was significantly better
Yes its about overcoming CPU bottlenecks so AMD CPUs always gain the most as they always perform worse so there is more bottleneck to be removed by Mantle.
core i3 and pentium anniversary is intel low-mid end offering so i just wonder if the gain will be enough to close the gap against core i7. given im still running core i3-530, how much of gain is what im trying to find out but most review out there prefer to compare a10 apu and core i7…
Well we do not have either of those CPUs but we will expand testing to include the anniversary edition CPU when AMD add more Mantle games later on. I’d presume the pentium anniversary would make a 10-15% gain. On your i3 530 which is clarkdale and fairly old I’d say you’ll see similar gains to the FX 8350: 20-30%.
not likely. even with cpu bottleneck removed, AMD cpu’s are still behind by about 2 cores to 1 margin. I know AMD loves to pull the card that their competitor is doing things to make games run worse on their hardware. So could the test be setup to run worse on intel chips?
Without Intel CPUs this article is not so much. We all know AMD CPUs cause bottleneck. Lets see some amd and intel comp.
I agree, AMD cpu’s being slower per core means more likely to be the bottle neck using directx.
bottleneck my dick i can play BF3 on ultra @ 60fps on my 7850k
Also dont forget to test mantle with 2 gb amd vga card.
Huh, funny thing with theif test, my 4770k at stock clocks and a gtx780 avg’s almost 70fps using directx. Yet an 8350 + 290x using mantle is 15% slower. yes using very high settings as well.