DICE's Johan Andersson talks about AMD Mantle API

During the AMD APU13 conference held in San Jose, California, Johan Andersson, the head-honcho behind DICE's Frostbite game engine, took the stage in order to talk a bit more about AMD's recently announced Mantle API, the upcoming Mantle update for Battlefield 4 as well the future support for Mantle. In case you missed it back when it was announced, the AMD Mantle API should provide PC game developers a similar experience that they have on consoles, with direct access to all GPU features, rendering techniques and reduced CPU overhead; all on GCN-based GPUs. Although consoles (even next-gen) are usually nowhere near a PC gaming system in terms of pure hardware power, games make more of the limited hardware due to a lower overhead of software (drivers, API, OS etc) According to Johan Andersson, the work on Mantle API in the Frostbite 3 engine took the team about two months of work and he described the core render as closer to the Playstation 4 than it is to the DirectX 11. Although he did not shed any light regarding performance estimates, he did note that it includes both CPU and GPU optimizations. During the same APU13 conference, AMD noted that the performance improvements could range anywhere from 20 to 50 percent. Johan also talked about the rest of the Frostbite 3 engine based games with Mantle API support including Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare and slide seen during the presentation also included some interesting game titles like Mirror's Edge, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Mass Effect, Need for Speed, Star Wars games, as well as earlier announced support for a popular crowd-funded game, Star Citizen. He also noted that Battlefield 4 Mantle API update is still on track to be released in late December. It will be interesting to see how big the performance gain is when running one or several AMD GCN-based graphics cards, like any of the newly released R9 series graphics cards (on AMD PCs!)