If you have been following the mess than has been Battlefield 4 since its release, what with the crashing on both PCs and consoles, you know that EA and DICE have decided that fixing the broken game is the number 1 priority. Gee, thanks.
While they work on that though, there is another casualty of development other than the pending DLC packs: AMD's Mantle version of the game. If you remember way back in September of 2013, along with the announcement of AMD's Hawaii GPUs, AMD and DICE promised a version of the BF4 game running on Mantle as a free update in December. If you are counting, that is just 1 more day away from being late.
Today we got this official statement from AMD:
After much consideration, the decision was made to delay the Mantle patch for Battlefield 4. AMD continues to support DICE on the public introduction of Mantle, and we are tremendously excited about the coming release for Battlefield 4! We are now targeting a January release and will have more information to share in the New Year.
Well, it's not a surprise but it sure is a bummer. One of the killer new features for AMD's GPUs was supposed to be the ability to use this new low-level API to enhance performance for PC games. As Josh stated in our initial article on the subject, "It bypasses DirectX (and possibly the hardware abstraction layer) and developers can program very close to the metal with very little overhead from software. This lowers memory and CPU usage, it decreases latency, and because there are fewer “moving parts” AMD claims that they can do 9x the draw calls with Mantle as compared to DirectX. This is a significant boost in overall efficiency."
It seems that buyers of the AMD R9 series of graphics need to wait at least another month to really see what the promise of Mantle is really all about. Will the wait be worth it?
Its really sad battlefield 4
Its really sad battlefield 4 came out the way it did.
I was waiting for this game for so long only to be disappointed. Even after all these patches and server updates, there are still some issues left to be dealt with.
EA has also 3 lawsuits on their hands from EA stock holders regarding battlefield 4 and its release state. I really hope this creates the worst imaginable situation for EA and they loose a ton of money and that this actually creates a precedent in the vague world of “botched releases”. This is EA’s second disaster this year following SIM CITY. Ill be honest, i cant wait for one of these money grabbers to pay for false advertisement or something similar.
Regarding mantle: I don’t know how much i can trust results from this title as its performance with the same base of hardware is all over the chart after each patch goes live.
Maybe they are spending time improving the mantle support. seeing how they released the game, if they released mantle as planned it would’ve been as broken as the rest of the game.
Indeed. The pain of the
Indeed. The pain of the incoming lawsuits must be higher (cost more) than the gain of releasing early (while the game was obviously still pre-beta) in order to hitch their sales wagon to the holiday shopping madness or it will all be for nothing; they’ll just consider the lawsuits a ‘cost of doing business’ and nothing will change.
See: Jennifer Government.
“This is EA’s second disaster
“This is EA’s second disaster this year following SIM CITY. Ill be honest, i cant wait for one of these money grabbers to pay for false advertisement or something similar.”
3rd forgot Medal of Honor Warfighter…
they strike out….
will one month of waiting be
will one month of waiting be worth it, while you can still play the game?
I play BF4 since release I
I play BF4 since release I have only one bug
I cant change the binding of the secondary weapon
pass that it’s a lot of fun and the game is way much finish than most of game I play this year … (specialy think about game with horrible interace designed for console )
people like to complain
I prefer to play ^^
i take it you never played
i take it you never played the multiplayer side of it.
im on a 770 so no mantle for
im on a 770 so no mantle for me unfortunately. But i really want mantle to work amazingly well, it will put some more preassure on nvidia considering amd is behind both next gen console, thus having the advantage of mantle becoming the standard on all future releases.
Im just pissed EA effed up battlefield 4 and that mantle will have to be first tested on this mountain of bad code.
I Agree with Dude. Mantle’s
I Agree with Dude. Mantle’s success will only mean good things for the industry.
Whether you are an Nvidia fan or an AMD fan, it is just silly to want one the other to fail.
Competition only helps the customers.
I feel bad for the friends of mine who bought new AMD cards just for Mantle in BF4. Heck I almost considered going the AMD/Mantle route, since I only really play Battlefield these days.
I want Mantle to work too ,
I want Mantle to work too , but as a AMD user I want GSync to work very good too and I want both techs to cross platform.
Would love to see both mantle and sync tech in one system
As for BF4 i play it alot, I didn’t have that many bugs, but when they happened they happened hard. Ive been more concerned about balance, they have only changed (nerfed) a few things from blind reaction to cry babies posting on the forums with no real intelligent thought. They also removed some key features from the last game that don’t make sense Id like to see re added.
yah, they nerfed a few things
yah, they nerfed a few things out of reaction, but in reality battlefield 4 is a mixture of Bad company 2 and battlefield 3 but with added pacing. Infact snipers are ridiculusly overpowered now, you see snipers charge like the assault class and quicksnipe… Levolution to me is nothing but scripted events. Destructible cover is nothing new either, its actually less impressive than it was in bad company 2, that game had amazing physics, still has full servers mind you.
another thing i dislike about bf4 is that you rarely will find a server that is balanced, winning team is always 100+ more tickets ahead. Games seem to run shorter too. i dunno, i wanna love it…i cant…
I have the R9 280x and
I have the R9 280x and haven’t had any glitches with battlefield 4 multi player (yet!).
I’d rather they delay mantle than, release it now and for it to be an utter failure! I hope it goes well for them in January.
My guess is that the
My guess is that the AMD/Mantle team doesn’t want the pre-existing crash conditions to crap all over their thunder, so they’re waiting longer to let EA/DICE fix more of the issues. While i have a 7950 and am excited to see what mantle has to offer, i agree with their delay. I want mantle to succeed, but it’s gotta come out swinging, not tied to a buggy BF4 boat anchor. Fix the foundation before you beautify the product. With that said, the latest BF4 patch seems to have fixed whatever issue was causing crashes for me, so i think my hardware/software configuration is ready for mantle:
MSI-Z68A-GD65
i5-2500K @4.3Ghz
MSI 7950
8G Gskill DDR3-1866
Samsung 840Evo 512
Win7 pro x64
Amd Catalyst 13.11
I have the Win8.1 Dev preview i’ll give it a try on as well as Catalyst 13.12 to try.
I like the term “Targeting a
I like the term “Targeting a January release”, that at least means if it isn’t out in January, they have their asses covered. I am quite surprised they haven’t just gone ahead and released it in truth, as the mess launch of the 290/X and still reading it is pot luck if you get one that black screens or not. I want to see Mantle a success but this just wreaks of fail.
I don’t care i have 120 fps
I don’t care i have 120 fps with my 780Ti Buhahahaha
I’ve played BF4 since
I’ve played BF4 since beta.
In the beta I had no problems… when the game came out it was crashing all over the place! hanging on loading, cant accept revive bug… general crashes to desktop. Now I don’t have any issues. Dice have worked hard to get these resolved. I’m sure EA FORCED the release of the game before it was ready, JUST like they did with Simcity. If it was my choice, I wouldn’t buy another EA game… with their “F*ck the end user, get it released and worry about it later attitude”.
Its annoying to be delayed
Its annoying to be delayed but its a good thing. No point releasing it if the game isn’t stable, so good move AMD/EA/Dice. BF4 is much better than it was, bug wise, so i don’t anticipate too much of a delay. It makes sense to delay it though rather than rush it out with existing issues still present. Let us not forget Thief arrives in Feb with full mantle and tru audio support so soon we’ll have more than just one game to try mantle on.