Sniper Elite 3 gets AMD Mantle support

This is the scene that was running for the benchmark. 88 FPS and 23% CPU usage on DirectX 11, and 100 FPS and 21% CPU usage on Mantle.

Sniper Elite 3 is the latest game to get support for AMD’s Mantle API.

Now, I don’t have an AMD card and I know very little about Mantle, so there’s quite a lot I don’t understand about this. Nonetheless: the latest patch for Sniper Elite 3, released today to coincide with the Catalyst 14.9 WHQL driver release, includes support for AMD Mantle.

There’s a lengthy and detailed blog post over on the Rebellion website discussing all the ins-and-outs of this implementation, but the upshot seems to be that Mantle runs faster and devours less resources than using DirectX 11 for the same scenes. The start position of Siwa, running on Ultra settings at 1920×1200 resolution, was left for 60 seconds on both – and on Mantle it resulted in a higher framerate, a more balanced load across all CPU cores, and lower CPU usage on the whole.

Bits of it make sense to me because I apparently have some minor technical knowledge, though a lot of it is over my head. Still, if you have an AMD card that supports Mantle, this is presumably a Good Thing.