Gadgetory

mantel in a nutshell is AMD's initiative to create a new programming model to fully exploit the capabilities of modern GPUs to improve graphics performance that's directly from their literature the Coolermaster Glaser 240 L CPU cooler delivers the convenience of an all-in-one and the performance of a custom water cooler click now to learn more the idea is to give developers the ability to have their game engines interact directly with the hardware to reduce unnecessary overhead to take advantage of mantle right now you'll need a GCN architecture AMD Radeon graphics card with a mantle compatible driver and a mantle ready game at the moment the only game commercially available is battlefield 4 but AMD also has a benchmark called star swarm that was built using the oxide engine that you can download on Steam now performance with mantle is a bit of a complicated story it is supposed to improve performance but it's not that simple so I'm gonna hand the video over to Luke who has spent the better part of a week testing multiple CPU platforms multiple graphics cards multiple benchmarking segments within battlefield 4 and generally going on a voyage of discovery about this exciting new technology from AMD without further ado I'll let him take it away the original purpose of this video was actually to go on the Steam Hardware survey and figure out what a lot of people were running and we were then going to benchmark those cards and those setups to figure out what tangible benefit people would get now with mantle that didn't really work out so well and I'll get into that more later on but for now we'll go into what actually we ended up doing to actually get the results that we were hoping to I changed from storming the beach on the Singapore level like I normally do with battlefield 4 benchmarks and went to the broken flight deck this is a little bit more CPU intensive than the Singapore level is and a better representation of mantle and we're trying to find better representations of mantle in battlefield 4 so it kind of made sense the 39 60 X to 90 X platform that I was running for this performed quite well and with the DirectX 11 to mantle comparison when both of them were overclocked we got about a 13 cent improvement going to mantle that's very solid for just switching a settings in your video settings but when we tried something that a few people have been trying which is underclocking their CPU to see what kind of performance gains they'll get then we moved the 30 - 60 X to 2 gigahertz and saw a 20% improvement which is a lot more solid although I don't see this being that tangible because the availability of really high-end powerful CPUs these days is making it so that not that many people actually have weak CPUs the the price per performance of CPUs is quite solid so most people even in the budget end are coming out with pretty solid CPUs far above the 2 gigahertz range that I set that CPU - so back to the steam hardware survey I ran a ton of different stuff based on the information that we got from the steam Hardware servers so that went from Radeon 77 70s 278 50s to 79 70s - r9 290 X's and then CPUs we went from 39 60 X's to 46 70 Ches - Kaveri CPUs I had tons of different setups and mixes and stuff going on and that felt as random and ridiculous as the results I got from those setups which didn't make a ton of sense now I don't know where to throw blame at for this there's a fairly new patch from EA for battlefields there's a new beta driver from AMD there's me testing on different levels in battlefield there's fraps and the built-in tool in battlefield recording the FPS there's tons of different stuff going on but either way these results were not properly representative of the platform and I know that for sure because there are certain setups that should have no matter what been above certain ones that they were not so these numbers were not valid and I'm not showing them and hopefully if you're watching this in the future all of those things have been resolved and that's why I'm not showing them is because if you watch in the future and I show all these problems and they're fixed then it's not very well applicable another thing to note if you're running these benchmarks on your own the best results are shown on GCN 1.1 that is the 290 series the 260 series and the 77 90 if you are running on GCN 1.0 that's say the 7000 series graphics cards you mental still works fine you'll still see improvements in especially the very specialized situations like star storm which we'll talk about later but it we'll be quite as nice as the improvements you'll see on GCN 1.1 another thing to note might be that battlefield 4 isn't actually in my opinion the best representation of mantle to really show mantle off you need a lot more CPU horsepower under there pushing the CPU as hard as you possibly can and with that enter star form star swarm is an entirely another beast this thing will punish your CPU as much as it possibly can and that's perfect to show off mantle so we tried this out in a ton of different ways and you can see in every different way I tried it out the simple switch over to mantle just completely destroyed it in a way that is speaks more than just the numbers this can actually unlock different types of games people can start developing things for mental that they weren't able to develop before maybe it's still an RTS but it's on a completely different level because each individual guy can have their own very highly advanced AI and you can have thousands of these little individual guys imagine playing an RTS with there's some of them out there but with thousands of little minions but having them all be very advanced AI that's something interesting to think about we even have games coming up in the near future that are already planned that can take huge advantage of mantle like star citizen there's going to be huge amounts of ships in one small area with AI controlled turrets with a is it manning different systems within your ship that is in this giant system and it's gonna be nuts there's projectiles will be flying all over the place and mantle will definitely help there as always check out the sticky under the PC gaming session on the forum join the organization we're currently in third place for total members and work it in close to second so be sure to join and just are you excited for this type of thing are you excited for mantle are you excited for the games I will be able to come up with mantle are you excited for the performance that mantle can unlock for you comment down below as always like and dislike the video depending on your mood and subscribe to Linus tech tips to see all of our other awesome content