What Mantle does

Mantle is the harmony of three essential ingredients:

1. A driver within the AMD Catalyst™ software suite that lets applications speak directly to the Graphics Core Next architecture;
2. A GPU or APU enabled with the Graphics Core Next architecture;
3. An application or game written to take advantage of Mantle.

Mantle reduces the CPU’s workload by giving developers a way to talk to the GPU directly with much less translation. With less work for the CPU to do, programmers can squeeze much more performance from a system, delivering the greatest benefits in gaming systems where the CPU can be the bottleneck. Learn more about Mantle.

Radeon HD 7000 series, R9 270X and R9 280X users will see limited performance gains in this first release of Battlefield 4 patch for Mantle, AMD says performance is still being tuned for all GCN cards and future releases will bring additional free performance to the table.

Important: Current driver MUST be uninstalled before updating to AMD Catalyst™ 14.1 Beta driver. For detailed instructions on how to correctly uninstall or install the AMD Catalyst Software Suite, please refer to the following support resources:

• How-To Uninstall AMD Catalyst™ Drivers From A Windows® Based System
• How-To Install AMD Catalyst™ Drivers For A Windows® Based System

Feature Highlights of The AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta Driver for Windows

Support for the following new AMD Desktop APU (Accelerated Processors) products:

• AMD A10-7850K
• AMD A10-7700K

Mantle Beta driver

• AMD’s Mantle is a groundbreaking graphics API that promises to transform the world of game development to help bring better, faster games to the PC
• Performance gain of up to 45%(versus the DirectX version) for Battlefield 4 on the R9 290 Series
• Performance gain of up to 200% (versus the DirectX version) for Star Swarm on the R9 290 Series
  • AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta must be used in conjunction with versions of these applications that support Mantle
  • It is expected that these applications will have future updates to support additional AMD Mantle features
• AMD Mantle Beta driver is currently supported on:
  • AMD Radeon™ R9 Series GPUs
  • AMD Radeon™ R7 Series GPUs
  • AMD Radeon™ HD 7000 Series GPUs
  • AMD Radeon™ HD 8000 Series GPUs
  • AMD A10-7000 Series and AMD A8-7000 Series APUs
• ​​​​​For additional details please see the AMD Mantle Technology FAQ on amd.com​
• Enhanced AMD CrossFire frame pacing – Support for 4K panel and Eyefinity non-XDMA CrossFire solutions (including the AMD Radeon R9 280, 270 Series, 7900 Series, 7800 Series) and Dual Graphics configurations​
  • ​​​Frame pacing ensures that frames rendered across multiple GPUs in an AMD CrossFire configuration will be displayed at an even and regular pace
  • Supported on 4K panels and Eyefinity configurations
  • Supported on AMD Dual Graphics configurations
  • Supported on DirectX® 10 and DirectX 11 applications​​​

Resolved issue highlights of AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta​​

• Resolves ground texture flickering seen in Total War: Rome 2 with high settings (and below) set in game
• Resolves flickering texture corruption when playing Call of Duty: Ghosts (multi-player) in the space station level
• Ground texture flickering seen in Total War: Rome 2 with high settings (and below) set in game
• Flickering texture corruption when playing Call of Duty: Ghosts (multi-player) in the space station level
• Blu-ray playback using PowerDVD black screen on extended mode
• Streaming VUDU HD/HDX content on Sharp PN-K321 (DP) causes the right-side half to flicker in and out
• Black screen happened after wake up the monitor
• Full screen issue at rotation in DX9 mode
• Video window black screen when using Samsung Kies to play video
• Crysis2 negative scaling in outdoor scene
• Crysis2 has insufficient CrossFire scaling in some scene
• Red Faction: The game has no or negative crossfire scaling with DX9 and DX11
• Age of Conan has corruption and performance issues with crossfire enabled
• Company of Heroes shadows are corrupted when using crossfire
• Resident Evil5 ‘s performance is unstable when display mode set to Window mode
• Total War: Shogun 2 flickering menu/text
• Frame rate drop when disabling post-processing in 3DMark06
• Negative Crossfire scaling with game “The Secret World” in DX11 mode
• F1 2012 Crashes to desktop
• Tomb Raider Hair Simulation Stutters on CFX
• Negative CrossFire scaling experienced in Call of Duty
• Battlefield 3 performance drop on Haswell systems
• Choppy video playback on 4k Video
• VSync ON Tearing with 2×1 Eyefinity SLS CrossFire
• Far Cry 3 – Game flickering while changing resolutions
• Display corruption and BSOD occurs when extending a display after disabling Multiple GPU SLS array
• Flickering seen when enable three 4kx2k panels at the same time
• No Video, just a black screen when setting Chrome to run in “High Performance” when playing certain video clips
• Image crashed on Starcraft game

Known Issues

• Mantle performance for the AMD Radeon™ HD 7000/HD 8000 Series GPUs and AMD Radeon™ R9 280X and R9 270X GPUs will be optimized for BattleField 4™ in future AMD Catalyst™ releases. These products will see limited gains in BattleField 4™ and AMD is currently investigating optimizations for them.
• Multi-GPU support under DirectX® and Mantle will be added to StarSwarm in a future application patch
• Intermittent stuttering or stability issues may occur when utilizing Mantle with AMD CrossFire™ technology in BattleField 4™ – AMD recommends using the DirectX code path when playing Battlefield 4 with multiple GPUs. A future AMD Catalyst release will resolve these issues
• Notebooks based on AMD Enduro or PowerXpress™ technologies are currently not supported by the Mantle codepath in Battlefield 4™
• AMD Eyefinity configurations utilizing portrait display orientations are currently not supported by the Mantle codepath in Battlefield 4™
• AMD Eyefinity technology is not currently supported in the Star Swarm​ application
• AMD testing for the AMD Catalyst™ 14.1 Beta Mantle driver has been concentrated on the following products: AMD Radeon™ R9 290X, R9 290, R9 280, R9 270, R7 260X, R7 260, HD 7000 Series, HD 8000 Series, A10-7850K and A10-7700K. Future AMD Catalyst™ releases will include full test coverage for all AMD products supported by Mantle.
• Graphics hardware in the AMD A10-7850K and A10-7700K may override the presence of a discrete GPU under the Mantle code path in Battlefield 4™
• Frame Pacing for Dual Graphics and non-XDMA configurations above 2560×1600 do not currently work with Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4. An upcoming release will enable support
• DX9 Dual graphics is not supported in AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta. An upcoming release will enable support

To download or see the supported video card list, visit AMD web site.

AMD Issue Reporting Form

This driver release incorporates suggestions received through the AMD Issue Reporting Form. To provide us with your feedback, use the appropriate form.

• AMD Issue Reporting Form for Beta Drivers on Desktop Products
• AMD Issue Reporting Form for Mobility Products

AMD announced the new R7 and R9 series last month, September 25th at GPU 14 event in Hawaii, but only today we’re given the pleasure to see their newer flagship video card in action: The AMD Radeon R9 290X. Under the hood Radeon R9 290X brings a new GPU dubbed Hawaii XT, a very powerful, tiny piece of silicon that sports a lot of power for both gaming and compute workloads. It’s also impressive to note that Hawaii is still using the same 28nm manufacturing process used by their previous flagship chip, Tahiti XT.

The Radeon R9 290X features 2816 GCN stream processors, 176 Texturing units, 64 render back-ends (ROPs) and 4 GB of memory on a 512-bit bus with a total memory bandwidth of over 300GB/sec, AMD vows for the best experience at Ultra HD gaming in 4K resolution with the new R9 290X.

It also features AMD’s new TrueAudio DSP technology and has support for the latest DirectX 11.2 and new Mantle, an API co-developed by AMD and Dice for fastest graphics and also meant to give access to GPU features not commonly accessible by APIs like Direct3D and OpenGL. Battlefield 4 will be the first title to use Mantle with a game patch coming in late December, and I’m looking forward to adapt RadeonPro in order to fully support Mantle!

Radeon R9 290X has a price tag of US$ 549, giving NVIDIA’s Titan and GTX 780 a run for the money by beating both competition video cards in several games while costing a lot less, almost half of Titan’s price which is sold for a thousand dollars.

The new R9 290X started selling today, October 24th – my birthday, with a suggested retail price of US$ 549 and there is a limited version bundled with Battlefield 4, which costs US$ 579. Pretty good value!

See below some links to reviews showcasing how good it performs. Good reading!

Bit-Tech
Computerbase
Hexus
LegitReviews
Overclockers.com
PcGamesHardware
SemiAccurate
TechPowerUp
TechSpot
TomsHardware