AMD brings Mantle to Sid Meier Civilization Beyond Earth

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 10/27/2014 01:32 PM | source: | 27 comment(s)

AMD today joins Firaxis Games in celebrating the release of Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth, which features day-one support for AMD's Mantle graphics API to enable top gaming performance for AMD Radeon graphics customers.

"AMD Radeon™ GPUs with Mantle are over a year ahead of other graphics companies in delivering high-throughput, high-efficiency graphics to gamers and developers," said Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager, Product and Platform Solutions Business Unit, AMD. "As gamers settle in for a marathon session of Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth, we're proud that the potent combination of Mantle and the award-winning Graphics Core Next architecture effortlessly enable the definitive experience."

Mantle is a "low-overhead" graphics API that can help improve performance for gamers by making better use of multi-core CPUs, streamlining game code execution, virtually eliminating software bottlenecks and utilizing GPU resources with incredible efficiency.2

In performance testing, the AMD Radeon™ R9 290X GPU with Mantle rendered Sid Meier's Civilization®: Beyond Earth™ at higher frame rates than any other single-GPU graphics card.3 Gamers looking to secure Mantle's blistering performance for their own empires can do so today with the purchase of an AMD Radeon™ R9 or R7 Series GPU starting at just $99 USD.4

Select AMD Radeon graphic cards are based on the GCN Architecture and include its associated features (AMD PowerTune technology, AMD ZeroCore Power technology, PCI Express 3.0, etc.). Not all features are supported by all products -- check with your system manufacturer for specific model capabilities.
Mantle application support is required.
In Sid Meier's Civilization®: Beyond Earth™ internal benchmark test at 3840x2160, the AMD Radeon™ R9 290X 8GB with Mantle outperforms the GeForce GTX 980 with DirectX® 11, NVIDIA's highest-performing single-GPU graphics card as of October 20, 2014, by 45.38 average FPS to 44.89 average FPS using the Ultra in-game preset with 8xAA. Test system: Intel Core i7-4960X, 16GB DDR3-1866, Asus SABERTOOTH X79, Windows 8.1 x64, AMD Catalyst™ 14.9.2 Beta and ForceWare 344.16 WHQL.
AMD suggest e-tail price (SEP) as of October 23, 2014.

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schmidtbag
Senior Member

Posts: 6575
Joined: 2012-11-10

#4946040 Posted on: 10/27/2014 03:12 PM

I actually kinda wish the anandtech benchmark had an APU on Mantle tested as well. It would be interesting to see if it would actually make the game playable on low end hardware. I've built a lot of machines recently with FM2/FM2+ CPU's.

Agreed. Considering Mantle is designed to lower CPU overheard, using a high-end i7 is really almost pointless. The only reason it isn't completely pointless is because it did still yield better results.

Also, the reviewer for that article is blatantly showing bias toward nvidia.

Slikar
Senior Member

Posts: 368
Joined: 2012-08-22

#4946045 Posted on: 10/27/2014 03:17 PM

wait, by 1 fps ? that's groundbreaking

Tree Dude
Senior Member

Posts: 532
Joined: 2005-10-09

#4946091 Posted on: 10/27/2014 04:10 PM

Anyone play this with mantle on a 2GB card? I am wondering if it has the same additional vRAM usage as it does with BF4 (making it useless unless you are ok with medium textures).

Rich_Guy
Senior Member

Posts: 12787
Joined: 2003-05-11

#4946122 Posted on: 10/27/2014 04:48 PM

Theres no need for Mantle, they should have just tried to get Dx11 running better like Nvidia, as its walloping Mantle.

shadow_craft
Senior Member

Posts: 189
Joined: 2011-12-06

#4946135 Posted on: 10/27/2014 05:27 PM

For some reason, when using Mantle and zooming into the terrain, it is not smooth, its like the frames are dropping.....

DX11 version doesn't suffer from this, Mantle works great in BF4 for me.

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