The reason I bought my 7970 GHz was in anticipation of Mantle, and it was on sale. But Mantle is here and BF4 has Mantle and I believe I am the perfect case study because I have the average gamer PC stock without overclocking. Because I can’t afford to replace burnt out video cards and CPU’s.
CPU: Core i5 4670K @ 3.8GHz (stock with turbo)
Mobo: MSI Z87-G45
GPU: Gigabyte 7970 GHz 1100MHz GPU | 1500MHz RAM (stock)
RAM: 32GB kingston meh 1600MHz
SSD: Kingston HyperX something or other
Monitor: Dell Ultra meh 24″ 1920×1200
So you can see I have the average “I want to play games on ultra settings @ 1080p” PC. It cost me just under $1200 to build without the monitor. I have BF4 with the recent Mantle update and the 14.1 beta drivers installed. This is not a scientific test. In fact I was going for a more real world scenario and for my own enjoyment.
BF4 includes a new frame time logger built into the game. You simply hit ~ for the console and then type in “PerfOverlay.FrameFileLogEnable 1” and then “PerfOverlay.FrameFileLogEnable 0” to stop it after a given period of time. I simply played a round of 64/64 to get a true test since most of the time I play on the larger maps with more players. Again, not scientific. Also, if you want to see your frames drawn on screen (without fraps) you can type in “PerfOverlay.DrawFPS 1” into the console (~) screen as well.
You can also use the Battlefield 4 settings editor to do some of this. http://battlefield.realmware.co.uk/bf4-settings-editor/
And there is more info here from the BF4 blog. http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/latest-catalyst-windows-beta.aspx
When you enable the frame time logger it will create a CSV file in your /documents/Battelfield 4 folder. This CSV will have all the frames and times. Simply use Excel to avg out the GPU frame time column and then divide 1000 by your average frame time. For example 1000/12.4 = 80.6 which would be your average frames per second.
And my results…
DX11 Auto 96fps
Mantle Auto 107fps
DX11 Ultra 65fps
Mantle Ultra 80fps
And a pretty graph …
As you can see my largest gain was with Ultra. Even before Mantle my PC could easily provide smooth game play, but with Mantle it’s even smoother. Keep in mind this is all beta but so far the numbers are promising.
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