Introduction
Today, AMD dropped its new Mantle-enabled drivers in the form of the Catalyst 14.1 Beta drivers. For those not familiar with Mantle, we'll give you the quick rundown on AMD's hot new API.
Mantle is an Application Programming Interface (or API) that allows game developers to get deeper access to your GPU, and more specifically, your Graphics Core Next (or GCN) based GPU. Mantle acts like DirectX or OpenGL, but was built specifically as a lower-level API.
This means that Mantle is better built to work with modern GPUs, as the GCN architecture, and removes a lot of the bloat from the software bottleneck for improved performance. A majority of this is saved time and resources from CPU and GPU communication.
Mantle is a big proponent of removing CPU-bound hassles, especially with lower-cost, lower-performing APUs. The improvements using an AMD APU and a decent AMD GPU are massive; some gains are over 300%, which is unheard of in today's world of tech and gaming.
What's Required
What you'll need is the Catalyst 14.1 Beta drivers , and a compatible Radeon GPU of course.
We used two SAPPHIRE Radeon R9 290Xs in CrossFire for our testing, on our Seiki Digital 39-inch 4K TV at 3840x2160.
