AMD’s Mantle API now supported in Battlefield 4

This scene may soon run faster for you. If you have the right AMD card.

The latest Battlefield 4 update adds compatibility with AMD’s Mantle system, which will ultimately give players with certain brands of AMD card a different rendering option for potential performance boosts. At the time of writing AMD hasn’t yet released the 14.1 Catalyst beta drivers, but once those are available from this page, people will be able to try it out.

To make use of Mantle, you’ll need to be running an AMD graphics card with “Graphics Core Next.” The Battlefield 4 blog update focuses on performance increases seen in R7 260X and R9 290X cards, but AMD has also confirmed that “AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta will support ALL desktop GCN products, though we are working with EA to further optimize performance on 280X, 270X, HD 7000 and HD 8000. We have asked EA to update their blog to reflect this.”

Right now it’s difficult to predict precisely what kind of FPS boost Mantle might give you, though the blog post suggests “The biggest performance gains can be seen when the game is bottlenecked by the CPU.” The drivers (once they’re released) are beta, so you can probably expect improvements as AMD and EA/DICE work together.