More AMD Mantle Reviews and more

AMD has been talking about the potential performance increase that their new Mantle technology is going to provide, we have all seen the numbers that AMD and EA-DICE has been releasing. AMD has finally released CATALYST 14.1 beta drivers, so now we can do our own independent testing to check out performance with and without Mantle enabled. Read on to see what happens to performance!

It has been a long time coming but we take a look at early and initial Mantle performance and a quick and rather basic initial article. The upcoming AMD Radeon 14.1 Beta driver will receive many improvements, the one most awaited being Mantle ready. At the simplest level, Mantle is an Application Programming Interface (API), or a language that game developers can use to write code that creates the graphics on your screen. In its current iteration, the Mantle API uniquely leverages the hardware in the Graphics Core Next architecture (GCN) of modern AMD Radeon. The massive advantage of Mantle is that it will free up the processor, and thus faster processors get less important as you need lesser CPU cycles.

There are no shortage of gaming headsets on the market today, but most typically favour the over ear or on ear design. Cooler Master and their gaming brand CM Storm look set to do something a little different and have created a more compact solution with their in-ear Pitch gaming earphones.

CM Storm are not the first company to do this of course, in ear gaming headsets are nothing new and companies like Steelseries have similar products on the market, but this is the first product like this from CM Storm.

We have high expectation of the Pitch as CM Storm have impressed us in the past with their other gaming audio devices such as the Ceres 300, Ceres 500, Pulse-R, Sirus and Sonus gaming headsets. I’m not expect the same performance as a headset with 40-50mm drivers, but I am expecting a certain level of quality that we’ve come to expect from Cooler Master.

After a false start or two, AMD is finally getting the first beta of Mantle out the door. With EA DICE having shipped their Mantle patch for Battlefield 4 and developer Oxide having released their Star Swarm technical demo, the first Mantle-enabled applications have landed. Meanwhile AMD for their part is still hammering out an installation issue on their new Mantle-enabled Catalyst drivers, which has led to them missing their previously scheduled January release date. In the interim, AMD has released a slightly finickier set of drivers to the press for us to play around with ahead of the public Mantle driver release. These drivers should be functionally and performance identical to the public drivers, they just have an outstanding installation bug that requires a workaround, something that AMD doesnt want in the shipping version. AMD hasnt provided a public release date for these drivers at this point its in their best interest to avoid providing release dates they dont know if they can keep but given the fact that this is the sole showstopper issue in our press drivers, we certainly dont expect theyll take much longer.

With being in the process of assembling a new automated test farm for Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org / Phoromatic test purposes, when it came to finding new computer cases I ended up finding a decent choice with SilverStone. While SilverStone is known for their very expensive and high-end cases, the Precision PS08 is less luxurious but sells at a very nice price.