Quality settings and resolution were kept the same between the Mantle and DirectX version of all our games.įor the sake of transparency we want you to know that AMD provided us with quite a few of the components used for this article.
All of our tests were run at 1080P with varying quality settings on a per platform basis. All of these games have both Mantle and DirectX 11 based rendering engines and enable us to create a comparison that is as apples to apples as is technically possible. To recap our testing condition rather quickly we looked at five games: Civilization: Beyond Earth, Plants Vs Zombies: Garden Warfare, Thief, Sniper Elite 3, and Battlefield 4. Now we’re going to take a step back and look at the differences between DirectX and Mantle performance across all our platforms. For some perspective on the midrange we plugged in an R9 270X and then to see what budget APU performance looked like we dusted off our Athlon 5350.
Then we looked at the entry-level space with AMD’s top APU. We started at the high-end with a six core CPU and an R9 290X. So far we’ve taken a platform by platform look at our DirectX versus Mantle match up.
For information on the Mantle API and DirectX 11 please read part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4 of this series. In Part 5 of this series we’ll be looking at the benefits of AMD’s Mantle API over Microsoft’s DirectX 11. This is a five part series in part 5 we’ll be taking a holistic look at all of our testing in this series.