About Mantle

Battlefield 4 players with an AMD video card can now activate the new Mantle renderer as an alternative to DirectX since the latest BF4 Mantle patch and the latest AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta video drivers. Mantle is a new low-level graphics API which is a different when it comes to the usage of the GPU of the graphics card. That means the Mantle renderer promises performance increases in the Frostbite engine as long as your components allow it.

According to DICE, the biggest performance benefits can be seen if the graphics card GPU and the game is bottlenecked by the CPU. Also the GPU workload has been optimized. You might want to check out if the new Mantle renderer shows performance increases on your system too.

The Requirements

– You need to have an AMD video card with GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture.

– You will need the AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta drivers (or higher if you read late) which you usually can find here.

– And should have a Windows 64 bit OS installed (either Windows 7, 8 or 8.1 for example)

– And of course, you will need to have Battlefield 4 installed (logical or?)

How to activate Mantle in Battlefield 4

Once you meet all the requirements, you can start Battlefield 4. You could just start a multiplayer game but if you want to have some time to mess around with some other graphics settings as well, it is advised that you just start the test range of Battlefield 4 as you do not have any human opponents there.

When the game is fully loaded you will need to open the options screen of BF4. Then you will open the “video” settings and there you will find an entry called
“Graphics API” on the right side of the screen. You simply have to change from DirectX to Mantle and that is all you need to do!

Once you did that, you can check out if the Mantle graphics API shows any significant performance increases. Be sure to check this out in the multiplayer mode as well, as there are different stress scenarios for your hardware. But as said, for a first look you can also just fiddle around with your settings on the Battlefield 4 test range.

Tell me if you noticed any performance benefits when using the Mantle API.