Battlefield 4. The first thing that comes to mind when thinking about the game is the abundance of patches it’s getting. Heck, there are more patches coming out for DICE’s powerhouse shooter than for all the Steam Early Access games combined. Ok, that might be a slight exaggeration, but the fact that Battlefield 4 is covered in bandages from bug-wounds cannot be contested. Up until now, most Battlefield 4 patches were aimed at preventing crashes and making the game somewhat stable. The latest patch for the EA/DICE shooter is slightly different, in the sense that it aims to greatly increase performance and shifts focus towards balancement.
AMD users will be glad to know that the anticipated Mantle renderer has just become a reality. Johan Andersson, one of the technical directors behind the Frostbite team, gave some details about what Mantle really does for Battlefield 4:
“Mantle is a new low-level graphics API that we’ve been working very closely with AMD on over the last 2 years and it is a major change & improvement to how we are able to program & use modern GPUs in order to get the most out of them. Battlefield 4 on PC is already quite heavily optimized using DirectX 11 and DirectX 11.1, but with Mantle we are able to go even further: we’ve significantly reduced CPU cost in our rendering, efficiently parallelized it over multiple CPU cores and reduced overhead in many areas.”
To cut things short, this means that if you own a GCN (Graphics Core Next) technology AMD GPU, you’ll be able to get a performance increase between 14% and 58%. Not that optimization was one of the major issues with Battlefield 4, if anything, the game was already fairly well optimized on the PC. Still, the performance boost is huge. The graphics cards that have GCN support are:
- Radeon R7 series
- Radeon R9 series
- Radeon HD 7000 series
Besides having one of these GPUs, you’ll also need the new Catalyst drivers and a 64 bit operating system (Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 8.1).
Assuming you have everything required, you’ll see a new Graphics API option, which you’ll have to set to Mantle!
Along with the introduction of Mantle support, Battlefield 4 is getting numerous tweaks and fixes, with a notable boost to DMR damage output. Here’s the complete list of changes in the latest patch:
CPU/GPU performance and monitoring
-Tweaked and improved CPU multi-core utilization to try and avoid stuttering and low framerate due to stalls that happened on some CPU and OS configurations.
-Users can now configure and control themselves how many CPU cores should be used in the game with the new “Thread.MaxProcessorCount” settings in User.cfg.
-“Render.DrawScreenInfo 1” now also shows information about which CPU and GPU is in the system, how many GPUs & CPU cores are used and which renderer (DirectX 11 or Mantle) is active
-Added new “PerfOverlay.FrameFileLogEnable” command that records frame times on CPU & GPU and logs out to a .csv file
-AMD Catalyst driver 13.12 (or later) is now recommended instead of 13.9
-Enabled tile-based compute shader lighting optimization on Nvidia for improved GPU performance (already active on AMD GPUs)
-Improved performance with rendering and spotlights for all GPUs, primarily in in-door environments
DMR Balance Tweaks
-Increased the damage of all DMRs across all ranges. Specifically, damage has been increased at long ranges to allow three-hit kills against unarmored opponents. Additionally, reduced the penalty to accuracy for sustained DMR fire, allowing more rapid follow up shots in combat. The amount of the damage increase varies from weapon to weapon, according to its intended range, rate of fire, and damage. We will continue to monitor the effectiveness of DMRs in combat, and determine if additional action is needed to make DMRs a viable mid to long range weapon.
Other Items
-Significantly reduced the duration of the black screen when spawning in, and fixed the issue with players getting killed before being in-game
-Greatly reduced the risk of crosshairs disappearing, which would also result in hit markers disappearing
-Added a headshot icon on the killcard. This should help identify instances where players are correctly killed by one shot
-Fixed an issue in Squad Deathmatch where the “Win/Lose” text was overlapping
-Fixed an issue with players using an exploit for the SOFLAM
-Fixed an issue with players using an exploit for the MAV
-Fixed the gameplay code to properly track the FOV (Field of View) changes in the options menu
-Fixed an issue where chat would break when entering “false” or “true” in the chat window
-Fixed an out-of-helicopter glitch in Air Superiority where players could spawn on the ground and play as infantry
-Fixed the misaligned crosshairs on the T90 MBT
-Added setting to tweak joystick dead zone
-Various minor crash fixes