[pcper] Frame Rating: Battlefield 4 Mantle CrossFire Early Performance with

[Final8ty]

BF4 Integrates FCAT Overlay Support

Back in September AMD publicly announced Mantle, a new lower level API meant to offer more performance for gamers and more control for developers fed up with the restrictions of DirectX. Without diving too much into the politics of the release, the fact that Battlefield 4 developer DICE was integrating Mantle into the Frostbite engine for Battlefield was a huge proof point for the technology. Even though the release was a bit later than AMD had promised us, coming at the end of January 2014, one of the biggest PC games on the market today had integrated a proprietary AMD API.

When I did my first performance preview of BF4 with Mantle on February 1st, the results were mixed but we had other issues to deal with. First and foremost, our primary graphics testing methodology, called Frame Rating, wasn't able to be integrated due to the change of API. Instead we were forced to use an in-game frame rate counter built by DICE which worked fine, but didn't give us the fine grain data we really wanted to put the platform to the test. It worked, but we wanted more. Today we are happy to announce we have full support for our Frame Rating and FCAT testing with BF4 running under Mantle.

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphi...eld-4-Mantle-CrossFire-Early-Performance-FCAT



This info as come to light that there is more than 1 frame pacing method built into BF4.

From the Lt.

LT has been hard at work. in his conversation with Johan yesterday on twitter he told me that there is two different frame pacing methods. Tell people to type RenderDevice.FramePacingMethod 1 into the console. It works wonderfully and gives the same fps as with it disabled. Method 2 (default since the patch) is what hits fps hard but gives the most consistent and tight (ridiculously so) frame times, hence the lower fps. Check my attached screenshots and post them to the thread. Look at the fps gain while using Method 1 vs Method 2. Incidentally frame pacing is so tight and consistent i cannot tell a difference between both on or off regardless of method used.


Frame Pacing Method 1




Frame Pacing Method 2

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=26104277&postcount=14

 

[Skurge]

This is pretty impressive. It looks tighter than single GPU. I wonder if it causes any input lag.

 

[Enigmoid]

The consistency of mantle on the SB-E platform is nice but given the huge framerate deficit it seems more like an internal framerate limit than something special. Do you really care about the greater variance when frametimes are consistently lower than the mantle system? The APU results are good though.

 

[Skurge]

Apparently the guy who tested both couldn't notice a difference.

 

[MeldarthX]

I've been watching that thread; humbug has a similar set up to me; he's doing a lot of testing on this.....his finding are really good specially since its 7000 series of card and not 290s