AMD’s Mantle benchmarked: The biggest innovation in gaming since DirectX 9
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Mantle in BF4
We tested Battlefield 4 on the same platforms we used for testing Star Swarm but added Crossfire benchmarks to examine Mantle’s dual-GPU performance story. As with Star Swarm, GeForce performance is included for reference only. Kabini is also strictly included for reference — the only way to get the game running on the AMD A4-5000 was to cut the resolution to 1024×768 and cut in-game detail to its lowest possible level. Even then, the results weren’t encouraging.
Our evaluation used the 64-player version of the Golmud Railway map. All benchmarks were performed on the same server with a full group of people. We’ve split Crossfire and single-GPU into two different graphs to make the data manageable; we’ll start with single-GPU. AMD’s “Known Issues” page notes that the Mantle driver may not perform well in Direct3D mode in Battlefield 4, so we tested single-GPU performance in Direct3D using the last officially published Catalyst 13.12 drivers. Battlefield 4 was tested at 1920×1080 with the Ultra preset across all systems.
As before, we’ll start with Direct3D. The GTX 770’s score of 71 fps isn’t surprising in this context — remember, we’re comparing it to a GPU that’s $200-$250 more expensive. In Direct3D, we see the Core i7-4770K and the Core i3-4330 tie at 101 FPS. The A10-7850K’s integrated GPU does surprisingly well, at 33 fps, while the A10-7850K + R9 290X pushes 71 fps. Intel’s Core i3-4330 is $50 cheaper than the AMD APU and is 1.42x faster in Direct3D. Not the greatest combination.
Switch to Mantle, and the performance gains are (mostly) small. The A4-5000 picks up about 5%, the two Intel cores are a respectable 11% faster, as is AMD’s A10-7850K. Nice, but hardly overwhelming. Then we threw the R9 290X into the AMD testbed and saw performance skyrocket from 71 fps to 91 fps. That’s a gain of 28%, and it changes the nature of the Intel / AMD comparison.
The Crossfire comparison, unfortunately, isn’t quite this clear-cut.
Note that the Core i3-4330’s performance is actually worse in Crossfire than it is with just one card. We repeated this test multiple times — for whatever reason, the dual-core CPU couldn’t drive both GPUs properly. Similarly, the A10-7850K is slightly faster with two R9 290X GPUs (80 fps vs. 71 fps) when running in DX11 mode, but falls flat in Crossfire and winds up 1 fps slower overall in Mantle as compared to single-card results.
That leaves the Core i7-4770K to carry the torch, which it does with aplomb. Switching to the Mantle API improves performance by 22% relative to Direct3D. Even better, the scaling factor improves. A pair of R9 290X cards is 49% faster than a single card when using DirectX 11, but 63% faster under Mantle. We suspect the gains would be greater at higher resolutions; the R9 290X is designed for 2560×1600 or 4K scenarios, not 1080p. (Read: No, TV makers, 4K and UHD are not the same thing.)
But one thing we can check, independently of frame rate, is frame smoothness. How much does BF4 improve the sometimes-rocky experience of playing games in Crossfire, over and above those improvements introduced by the XDMA engine of the Hawaii GPU family?
This graph shows the 1% worst frame times for the AMD A10-7850K and the Haswell Core i7-4770K. Note that while performance on the dual-GPU R9 290X was flat for AMD, 1% frame times still show significant improvement. The smaller the initial number, the less noticeable the improvement is, but the figures here illustrate that latencies can improve even when frame rates hold steady.
Next page: Conclusion