Mantle is HERE!

I notced the differnce too it looks shaper in mantle and i dont have to wait for textures to load up when first jioning a mp game on DX i was invisible with no gun for around 10seconds and things like trees steps and ground textures dident apeer for a good 5-10seconds.

In mantle however it took less than a second to load my gun and textures up this only seams to happen to me in multiplayer games.

I can now enable vsync and keep 60fps without any deviation in fps too where as will DX11 some maps droped to 35-40fps in some areas for no reason for instance siege of shanghai running from the spawn in between the large biludings tanked the fps to 35fps.

the MANTLE screens seem more organic... more realistic... the clouds in MANTLE are better , i love them

meh is for mantle

Forgive me if I have missed something, but mantle wasn't supposed to improve the graphics quality (ie: textures etc.) but rather improve/optimize how the game runs (ie: faster frame rates, better frame pacing, reduced load times etc.). So how or why is it you guys are supposedly seeing graphical image-quality improvements? I'm not saying you are lying, I'm just wondering if some folks are experiencing some minor "placebo" effects after installing the mantle patch and driver updates... 

I don't yet own BF4, I've only played the beta, back when it was available. The images posted above are not large enough for me to clearly see any significant differences, though I do see a few. 

Found something interesting. The Mantle Patch and Catalyst 14.1 boost performance of my 7850K rig in BF4, at 1080 with a mixture of med-high settings with blur and stuff off, I was getting about 27-32. Now I get 31-36 which is not a great boost but it is an improvement.

But get this...on my 6800k rig which with the same settings was getting 23-4 fps average (ish) it now gets about 30. 

On a laptop we have an Acer with a 5757M and 8650G (Richland, 384 cores) , well that got - at 1366x768 on everything low, about 28 fps average on most maps, lower on some, higher on others. But i'd say averaged out about 27 and just under playable.

With 14.1 it gets 35+...

In fact I can now add medium settings and it still gets 34-35 on some maps average.

Just to be sure, tried the older driver with Heaven Benchmark on the laptop, dx11 on low and it got 785, but with 14.1 it got 863.

DX9 benchmark 3dmark06...there was no improvement well just 20 points which is the variance between tests anyway on that piece of software.

Draw your own conclusions but the 14.1 patch or the Mantle BF4 patch also 'boost' none GCN hardware.

...and yes we do own three copies of BF4, one we bought and the other two came with graphics cards purchases on other systems.

Mantle vs DX11 comparison.

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/60846

Setings..

There is a noticeable difference in shading.

 

Actually star swarm is rather low quality . The shear amount of things it has to track is the amazing part. I definitely see this tech as a must in any group gaming. I have noticed improvements in enviroments of games.  I am seeing some games that just dont like the new drivers at all . Any gamer that plays large mmos is going to want Mantle. Been in battles so large that a smooth 30 fps is heaven.

 

I actually prefer the image that Mantle produces.

I didn't encounter the problems that you have in DX, just a fuzzy, blurry look to the game, like there was too much AA.

If it were not for the occasional stuttering that occurs on SP and MP then Mantle would be the clear winner for me even it's current BETA form.

Thanks for posting. Yeah, there's definitely some differences in the lighting/shading. 

Here are links to the larger images. The differences are subtle but they're there. I haven't adjusted any settings other than the API.

Mantle:

http://i1371.photobucket.com/albums/ag304/Theblackrain1/BF4MANTELRENDER2_zps58167164.png

DX:

http://i1371.photobucket.com/albums/ag304/Theblackrain1/BF4DX11RENDER2_zps6d7de483.png

Mantle:

http://i1371.photobucket.com/albums/ag304/Theblackrain1/BF4MANTELRENDER1_zps718dc286.png

DX:

http://i1371.photobucket.com/albums/ag304/Theblackrain1/BF4DX11RENDER1_zps610b77b5.png

 

I've logged a little over 170 hours into this game and for the most part played on 64 player Conquest mode servers. Which means basically all the stuff in the game is there on the bigger maps, and the maps themselves are incredibly detailed. What I suspected to be areas on some maps where I was being very limited by the CPU (i5 3570k at 4GHz), were confirmed when I upgraded to a R9 290 graphics card. I could raise most settings, but the ones for mesh detail, ground geometry detail and environmental decorations were still hard on the system. I run my monitor at a custom 70Hz to get a little extra smoothness out of the graphics in shooters, and it really feels in the gameplay even if the framerate drops down towards 50 per second. When you're concentrating hard to keep a straight aim it takes less of a difference than otherwise to make your brain feel that something isn't quite right.


So in order to avoid any major slowdowns when the servers rotated to the heavier maps, I was running with such geometrically related settings on low. So far, having played the game in Mantle renderer mode for about five hours in total I see that High runs fine now. It's clear that they did manage to free up quite a bit of CPU resources that otherwise go used as "overhead" in the DirectX engine. An i5 3570k slightly overclocked to 4GHz is no slouch, so it seems very much like they are on to something here and it's more than making games better on low budget CPU's. It's also about making it possible to add even more detail to games when a system has a perfectly decent CPU, but the existing platform has significant limitations.


This beta driver and/or the Mantle renderer for Battlefield 4 isn't perfect yet though. A few times each round and mostly early on I experience some "hitching", short periods of stuttering that last about a second. Many others experience similar issues too and there are many theories about what might cause it, though it seems rather random. To me it's still well worth enduring and to be frank it doesn't rank up with the most annoying things I've seen in Battlefield 4 since the beginning. The game has been frustratiing at times, but it's also true that some of the heights of multiplayer shooter gameplay I have only ever experienced in Battlefield.

The lighting is currently too bright in Mantle mode. That has been confirmed but is just that, a brightness value in the engine and it shows especially with fog. It will be fixed.

I've logged a little over 170 hours into this game and for the most part played on 64 player Conquest mode servers. Which means basically all the stuff in the game is there on the bigger maps, and the maps themselves are incredibly detailed. What I suspected to be areas on some maps where I was being very limited by the CPU (i5 3570k at 4GHz), were confirmed when I upgraded to a R9 290 graphics card. I could raise most settings, but the ones for mesh detail, ground geometry detail and environmental decorations were still hard on the system. I run my monitor at a custom 70Hz to get a little extra smoothness out of the graphics in shooters, and it really feels in the gameplay even if the framerate drops down towards 50 per second. When you're concentrating hard to keep a straight aim it takes less of a difference than otherwise to make your brain feel that something isn't quite right.

So in order to avoid any major slowdowns when the servers rotated to the heavier maps, I was running with such geometrically related settings on low. So far, having played the game in Mantle renderer mode for about five hours in total I see that High runs fine now. It's clear that they did manage to free up quite a bit of CPU resources that otherwise go used as "overhead" in the DirectX engine. An i5 3570k slightly overclocked to 4GHz is no slouch, so it seems very much like they are on to something here and it's more than making games better on low budget CPU's. It's also about making it possible to add even more detail to games when a system has a perfectly decent CPU, but the existing platform has significant limitations.

This beta driver and/or the Mantle renderer for Battlefield 4 isn't perfect yet though. A few times each round and mostly early on I experience some "hitching", short periods of stuttering that last about a second. Many others experience similar issues too and there are many theories about what might cause it, though it seems rather random. To me it's still well worth enduring and to be frank it doesn't rank up with the most annoying things I've seen in Battlefield 4 since the beginning. The game has been frustratiing at times, but it's also true that some of the heights of multiplayer shooter gameplay I have only ever experienced in Battlefield.

The lighting is currently too bright in Mantle mode. That has been confirmed but is just that, a brightness value in the engine and it shows especially with fog. It will be fixed.

Yes i noticed when someone has thrown out a smoke grenade on a indoor map like Operation Locker i cant see a damed thing lol but as i unistalled this game 2mths ago and only reinstalled it for mantle i thought it was just anuther stupid dice/EA mistake with the new patch.

I've tried using Mantle with my setup (8350 @ 4.8, 2 X 7970's) and my results have been mixed so far.

I know that in general, my performance (FPS) has gone up by about 20-25%. However, I'm also experiencing the intermittent frame drops that others are talking about (which do not occur when using DX11). 

I'm confident that with more mature drivers (non-beta) that these issues will eventually be solved.

For the time being, I'm sticking with DX11 in BF4, but only until 14.x drivers are out of beta.