14.1beta, mantle and BF4 on 7970's

Hey guys,

Last few days i have been reading tests with the new Mantel systems, i still dont fully understand it, but i understand its a replacement for directX ?

I am running 2x 7970s and over the weekend, i got back into BF4, now that its semi working again.

If i was to download the 14.1 beta drivers, that i understand have Mantel in them, do i need to do anything special of will it just take over from directx on its own?

Should one wait for non beta drivers? What the word on all this?

As far as I'm aware 7970s (or anything under the 290/290x) don't support Mantle yet in the drivers. I could be wrong, but I think that was stated in the BF4 thread and that support would be adding 280x/7970/etc cards in the near future.

Janus67 said:

As far as I'm aware 7970s (or anything under the 290/290x) don't support Mantle yet in the drivers. I could be wrong, but I think that was stated in the BF4 thread and that support would be adding 280x/7970/etc cards in the near future.

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Ah ok good know.

I lost performance using the Mantle API w/ 14.1 drivers on my 7970... not to mention going from 740 khs to 600... I went back to 13.12 I believe.

White Runner said:

I lost performance using the Mantle API w/ 14.1 drivers on my 7970... not to mention going from 740 khs to 600... I went back to 13.12 I believe.

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I have stopped mining on my main rig hahaha if i mine with it and run the microwave or anything, i get a power cut lol.

Gettming more power installed sometime soon i hope.

was just reading this article. And I had to chuckle... the mantle screens look more like how the world looks in real life. The fogginess you get at a distance, because air does after all have density. I've been in the desert combat-deployed and the sky wasn't bright blue.. it was washed out looking.. unless you were in a really dark spot looking up then it wasnt so bad. I'd take graphics realism over ultra sharp images 1400 miles away any day.

derail over...

It also has to be enabled in the BF4 settings. It was laggy for me so I just went back to the 13.12's. ATI drivers are all poor at best but the beta are the worst of the worst.

Meh, there like 5fps difference between using Mantle or DC with my R9 270X. I think it'll improve as the drivers mature though

This only works with GCN2 architecture AFAIK as well. That is 290x/290/260x. All others are GCN and rebrands. Expect differences with those later down the line.

i can enable mantle with the new drivers, and my 280x cards.

dyckah said:

i can enable mantle with the new drivers, and my 280x cards.

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I had to manually do it with the 14.1 but the 14.2 changed BF4 to mantle on it's own. I had more than the usual crashes and BSOD's so I went back to the 13.12 both times. I actually could not just uninstall the betas and reinstall the regular, everything was there but the driver would just not work. Maybe because I was going backwards but with both sets of drivers I had to restore Windows to an earlier date before the beta installs

shadowdr said:

I had to manually do it with the 14.1 but the 14.2 changed BF4 to mantle on it's own. I had more than the usual crashes and BSOD's so I went back to the 13.12 both times. I actually could not just uninstall the betas and reinstall the regular, everything was there but the driver would just not work. Maybe because I was going backwards but with both sets of drivers I had to restore Windows to an earlier date before the beta installs

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weird.
no crashes here with the 14.2 drivers while gaming.
no difference in framerates between mantle and dx11, but the image is definitely different.

I really like Mantle and thought that ATI (yes, I said ATI: A Canadian firm) caught NVidia off guard with this. I always root for the underdog. It looks like DirectX 12 will allow for low-level access that will increase performance quite nicely (for DirectX 12 cards, that is).

With 14.3 Mantle in BF4 seemed smoother and yielded ~20 more max fps, but still crashed the game so DX was the option.

I tested Star Swarm today with max settings, average 29.81 fps in DX and 51.98 in Mantle, in DX it dropped as far as 9fps DX and as far as 21fps in Mantle, holy cow.

We'll have to see how Microsoft handles DX12, some are saying DX12 is just a remake of Mantle, which I find funny.

False Christian said:

I really like Mantle and thought that ATI (yes, I said ATI: A Canadian firm) caught NVidia off guard with this. I always root for the underdog. It looks like DirectX 12 will allow for low-level access that will increase performance quite nicely (for DirectX 12 cards, that is).

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Except it looks like Any card that can run Mantel will run DX12 .. and also any of the newer DX11.2 cards out their so tbh its probably going to be a better Mantel.
One that doesn't rely on AMD to optimize or be responsible to code properly which as most will admit AMD is not very good at doing lol they are so much better at making the actual hardware heh.

I think personally i don't care who does it as long as we see the benefits of Mantel come to market for all platforms.

I agree that AMD/ATI caught Nvidia off guard with this but i also think Microsoft has had this DX12 on the sidelines for awhile if they are already able to start propping it up and are implementing it which is kind of sad for us customers because were the ones that have been dealing with poor CPU core optimizations and underperformance and Utilization this whole time.

And for what reason? because they felt they didn't have reason to innovate since they already had the market share?

It's a shame that it takes a Hardware company "AMD" to innovate things on a software level "mantel" before the DirectX pull's the stick out of their buts and make the needed changes they have been sitting on for god knows how long.