ewok93 :
theagentd :
Mantle does nothing if you're GPU bottlenecked. At most you'll get a few extra FPS from Mantle. Hybrid Crossfire suffers from heavy microstuttering.
Move along, people. Nothing to see here.
If anything, the GPU will bottleneck the CPU, which Mantle will fix. Nobody said anything about crossfire. Please read the thread before you tell people to ignore it. This could actually develop into a pretty good discussion. Thanks for the link Squid. It should do pretty well with mantle it seems, assuming it's as great as AMD is saying, I'm sure it'll stay around 35 fps with mantle in a rocket laser tank battle.
I won't deny that Mantle will most likely improve performance by allowing BF4 to more efficiently utilize the GPU, for example through more effective memory management, improved pipelining and the ability to run compute jobs (e.g. lighting for BF4) at the same time as rasterization jobs, but believing that this will grant any significant changes on such a weak GPU is just wishful thinking. The most likely bottleneck this card will encounter is shader performance which is the one thing that Mantle will not affect at all. Mantle runs the exact same shaders as DirectX, most likely compiled to almost exactly the same assembler instructions for the stream processors.
If you watch the developer slides for Mantle you can see that the focus is on moving much of what has traditionally been the driver's responsibility to the developers which empowers developers to use the GPU more efficiently and closer to how the actual hardware operates, which at the same time massively simplifying the Mantle driver. The result is that the overhead is much lower since the abstraction layer is thinner and CPU utilization can be improved since you can submit render batches from multiple threads.
For these reasons the heavily CPU-optimized BF4 will see very little performance improvements for low-end GPUs which are bottlenecked by the GPU like those built into AMD APUs. On the other hand, for a game like Planetside 2 which is ridiculously CPU-bottlenecked, Mantle could essentially double or triple CPU performance for an almost equal FPS improvement while at the same time allow for an increased variety in the 3D models used thanks to the lower draw call overhead.
TL;DR: Mantle doesn't make GPUs run shaders faster. It just lets you optimize how you use the GPU for massive CPU performance gains but only a minor GPU performance boost, hence Mantle does very little for the APU mentioned in this thread.