Sources close to Nvidia will try to spoil the moment claiming that such performance can be expected only on slower cards but not on the top end products, and that they will be most evident in CPU strained games. Since AMD is selling CPUs that are nowadays being called APUs, we believe that Mantle support on entry-level APU integrated graphics is a very good thing.
Even without Mantle Kaveri AMD A10 7850K APU can score over 30 FPS at 1080p and medium settings. With this in mind, if Mantle is so successful and can deliver up to 45 percent faster performance, we should see Battlefield playable at much higher frame rates and much higher settings after the Mantle patch. We will wait and see, but it does sound too good to be true and if AMD pulls it off it will be an impressive coup. If the numbers add up, this will be the first time ever that we will have an APU capable of running one of the latest AAA games at 1080p, with no discrete graphics.
AMD hopes that it can sell more Radeon 270X cards and even some slower discrete card with Mantle powered Battlefield 4, but we still have to see the patch and the real performance. EA is still working on a patch that will include a lot of network code fixes and the Mantle patch, but it is not clear when this is going to roll out.
Microsoft’s Xbox One just got a BF4 patch and one can only hope that the Mantle patch for PC is coming soon to a GCN powered PC near you.
