Another game joins the list of Mantle supported titles. This time it’s Sniper Elite III from Rebellion. Mantle support for Sniper Elite III was planned from the beginning. However like most other Mantle enabled titles the aggressive release date set for the game prevented the developers from adding support at launch.

Mantle has been added to the game via an update. Which Steam will do automatically for you. The new update also includes a new benchmark mode that’s compatible with both DX and Mantle.

Rebellion’s Sniper Elite III has been developed on the Asura engine. Which Rebellion claims has been built to circumvent a lot of DX11’s weaknesses. Even with that in mind the team has managed to drastically improve the performance of the game through Mantle.

Mantle Enables Better Performance at Lower Power Consumption

What’s perhaps most impressive is that not only did Mantle deliver higher and more consistent framerates. But the low level API also achieved that with better power efficiency. By improving the performance scaling across all CPU cores and reducing the CPU overhead overall. The API allows the game engine to deliver better performance with lower resource utilization and thus lower power consumption.

Enhanced power efficiency may not sound very exciting to enthusiasts. But because the CPU doesn’t have to deal with as harsh a workload is it normally does with DX11. You can leverage the lower power and reduced heat to push your CPU clocks even higher. Delivering even better overall performance.

The Mantle version clearly shows a much more balanced CPU load across the cores – though the total CPU utilization has only dropped from 23% on DirectX 11, to 21% on Mantle. The more balanced load is exactly as we’d hoped, since all the Mantle API calls are now distributed across the available cores by our Asura engine’s multithreaded task system, just like we do for other systems like AI, animation or physics.

The size of the frame rate increase is a pleasant surprise, as frankly at this stage in development we were expecting to have a more equal frame rate when GPU bound. There’s still a fair amount of scope for increasing performance with Mantle, particularly as we’re not yet taking advantage of the Asynchronous Compute queue. This would allow us to take some of our expensive compute shaders – like our Obscurance Fields technique – and schedule them to run in parallel with the rendering of shadow maps, which are particularly light on ALU work.

With Mantle enabled the AMD Radeon cards beat out their more expensive Nvidia GeForce counterparts across the board. With the R9 290 series even outperforming Nvidia’s latest top dog Maxwell card the GTX 980. In summary Rebellion lists the following benefits to using Mantle.

• Improved frame rate
• Reduced CPU power consumption (important for laptops)
• Less susceptible to frame rate spikes when other programs hit the CPU
• Future scalability with higher numbers of cores
• Scope for increasing scene and world complexity
• Ability to increase the CPU budget for other systems like AI.

Currently there are four games which support Mantle. Battlefield 4, Thief, Plants vs. Zombies and Sniper Elite 3. There are 13 confirmed games with mantle support in development as of July of this year and 9 additional games with Mantle support pending. Yuu can find the entire list as provided by videocardz here.

You can find Rebellion’s full write-up on Mantle here and additional benchmarks below.

1 / 2

Read more: http://wccftech.com/mantle-arrives-sniper-elite-iii-enables-r9-290-beat-gtx-980/#ixzz3FIUINbzD

Wow! It really does show the performance benefits of low level access! Hopefully dx12 will do something similar with non-amd based cards

I wonder how much AMD paid for that ad.

 Seriously, the comparisons are so cherry picked and obvious that it isn't even a joke anymore. Mantle is great but it's not the snake oil it is praised to be. Its advantages only show in very limited use cases. It's even more apparent if you notice the lack of comparisons without mantle. The truth is that AMD cards run faster at Sniper Elite even without mantle. And they are especially favored on high resolutions(4k) where all AMD cards have the upper hand thanks to higher memory bandwidth. Also no thanks to mantle.

So no. All this test shows is that mantle has a whooping 21 to 23% CPU advantage. So it's minimally less strenuous on a resource that every gaming PC has more than enough of anyway.

Will have to see how everything stacks up when DX12 launches w/ Windows 10, according to Nov 2014's edition of Maximum PC:

"Intel's demo runs on a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 tablet with an Intel Core i5 processor, and delivered that huge performance leap simply by switching from the old API to DX12, without any hardware tweaks.

Specifically, a 3D app tasks the CPU and integrated graphics with rendering a scene filled with 50,000 asteroids. Two modes - Maximum performance and maximum power saving-switch the focus from pure frame rates to maximum battery life. In performance mode, the app runs as fast as possible within the thermal and power constraints of the platform. Using DX11, it pushes 19 frames per second. Switching to DX12 sees a 70 percent jump to 33fps."

Next few years are going to be awesome for PC Gamers, provided you know, devs are interested in playing around with it, of course.

Fixed that for you.

I mean seriously, you even said it in your quote. Mantle and DX12 will do absolutely nothing for actual gaming PCs which already have CPU power coming out of whatever their equivalent for ears is.

I am too dumb to deal with this kind of thing. Gimme a nice console game in a pretty colorful case with cute easy to use disks that I can shove in my consoles hooked to my cool tv. That is how I gamed when I was a kid, this is how I will keep doing for as long as God allows me.

How?

The GPU requirements will only go up. There will never be a CPU bottleneck and as such there is no benefit in reduced CPU requirements. Unless you count the few milliwatts you're saving.

Of course it has its benefits in special cases but it will never be effective in the broad spectrum for hardcore gamers. Especially not for high end systems.

"Whatever, it seems PC Gamers can expect big performance boost with their existing hardware when DX12 arrives with MS9 OS, most likely in the first half of 2015." - PL (Paul Lilly)

You really shouldn't just 'assume' things, especially things that weren't even remotely stated in a quote, he was merely detailing how the DX12 improvements effected the CPU and integrated graphics of the machine that the demo was run on. 

I highly doubt that people who buy highend systems will wait for it to become outdated before they buy something new.

And even so, an outdated high end system will have the same CPU/GPU ratio when it comes to performance. Meaning the GPU will always limit before the CPU does.