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Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth to Support AMD Mantle

By - Source: Guru3D | B 15 comments

Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth will support AMD's Mantle API.

Official Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth Announce Trailer - "A New Beginning"

Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth was announced at PAX East. This game expands upon the Civilization series of games, but takes a leap off our (then not so) humble planet and into space.

Not many exact details about the game are known yet; however, a new announcement has shed some light on a non-gameplay related feature of the game: It will have support for AMD's Mantle API.

Being a strategy game, having support for AMD's Mantle API is quite the bonus. Strategy games are known to be particularly CPU intensive, therefore limiting performance on systems with weaker CPUs. AMD's Mantle API significantly reduces the CPU overhead in games. Thus systems with weaker CPUs will experience a notable performance boost over using DirectX. Of course, to make use of this API you must be running a more modern AMD Radeon graphics card.

The game is set to be released sometime throughout fall 2014, and will make its debut on Windows, OS X and Linux. For those of you who haven't seen the official announcement trailer yet, be sure to watch the video embedded above.

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Top Comments
  • 21 Hide
    PedanticNo1 , April 14, 2014 5:55 PM
    Gee, I don't know, what difference would less CPU overhead make for a TBS game- a genre traditionally limited by CPU processing power? Hmm.

    Now you know why you were downrated.
Other Comments
  • 21 Hide
    PedanticNo1 , April 14, 2014 5:55 PM
    Gee, I don't know, what difference would less CPU overhead make for a TBS game- a genre traditionally limited by CPU processing power? Hmm.

    Now you know why you were downrated.
  • Display all 15 comments.
  • 3 Hide
    firefoxx04 , April 14, 2014 7:45 PM
    "Gee, I don't know, what difference would less CPU overhead make for a TBS game- a genre traditionally limited by CPU processing power? Hmm."

    Gee I dont know, maybe more FPS? The whole point of mantle is to remove CPU overhead. If the game is already limited by the CPU, Mantle will make a difference.

    Its when games ARE NOT limited by the CPU that mantle makes little to no difference. Mantle is good for AMD users with weak cpus and strong graphics cards.
  • 7 Hide
    oxiide , April 14, 2014 7:57 PM
    Quote:
    Anyone know if the world map is still flat 2D or finally 3D? I'm doubting the planets will be 3D like Planetary Annihilation so it won't be too much of a shame if the map is flat too.


    The map in Civ V isn't 2D, its rendered in 3D (and even includes tesselated geometry) but with a locked camera angle. If you don't like that, that's fine, but its a design choice and part of the style of the franchise. There's plenty of 4X games with a truly adjustable camera.

    I think I heard that Beyond Earth will include a new map layer for planetary orbit. But I definitely wouldn't hold my breath for a Planetary Annihilation-style camera. If you want that game, play that game.
  • 3 Hide
    rdc85 , April 14, 2014 7:58 PM
    For strategies/tactical game, Most of CPU power will be dedicated for Enemy AI.. (CPU bound).

    Will mantle helps? time will tells...

  • 3 Hide
    falchard , April 15, 2014 1:01 AM
    Excited for the game.
  • 2 Hide
    Mathos , April 15, 2014 2:43 AM
    I'm more interested in knowing, is it going to be like the mod for Civ4 where you're colonizing planets, and treating them as "cities" or if it's some kind of replacement/long over due remake for Alpha Centauri.

    And on the Mantle support, Civ V is rendered in 3D, terrain, models, etc. But, it also heavily supports OpenCL. Mantle is designed to also improve opencl performance in CPU bound situations, running the game on an APU for example. That would mean better fps on lower end systems. Faster AI turn processing, especially later in the game, when there are hundreds of units, etc. It's not quite as bad, about AI turns in V as it was with IV, due to removing the stacks of doom. But it does still get bogged down later on.
  • 1 Hide
    drethon , April 15, 2014 5:05 AM
    I wouldn't think it would be so much about FPS but about turn times while processing the AI moves.
  • 0 Hide
    abimocorde , April 15, 2014 5:34 AM
    For the trolls that cried a bunch of crap about Mantle being useless: There you go!!
  • 5 Hide
    Wisecracker , April 15, 2014 6:22 AM



    From Tech Report


    That's a 10% improvement in FPS with an i7-4770 running a 290X.

    The Mantle FPS improvement with the A10-7850K APU can only be characterized as :ouch: 

  • 0 Hide
    fandroid , April 15, 2014 6:36 AM
    Hopefully AMD gets Mantle working correctly sometime soon. Its still useless for me with my 280x in BF4 due to insane random lags spikes and lag when zooming weapons where DX runs nice and smooth and pretty much the same frame rate.
  • 0 Hide
    vir_cotto , April 15, 2014 6:40 AM
    Awesome I hope this game is good!
  • 0 Hide
    Alec Mowat , April 15, 2014 6:43 AM
    BF4 is heavily reliant on CPU, especially in Multiplayer.
    @720P in Medium settings, using only a A10-7850k on Mantel, I get an easy 50 - 60 FPS and the game is very playable. A huge improvement over Direct X on that chip.
    Mantel will take the workload of the graphics off the CPU and allow the game to run faster between turns, in theory.
  • 0 Hide
    alxianthelast , April 15, 2014 7:47 PM
    Quote:
    Gee, I don't know, what difference would less CPU overhead make for a TBS game- a genre traditionally limited by CPU processing power? Hmm.

    Now you know why you were downrated.


    Because I thought saying modern games on today's PC don't have these limitations anymore.. because you couldn't buy a 32 bit system, or without at least 4 gigs of ram, if you tried.. but apparently it wasn't redundant after all.
  • 0 Hide
    alxianthelast , April 15, 2014 7:50 PM
    Quote:
    Quote:
    Anyone know if the world map is still flat 2D or finally 3D? I'm doubting the planets will be 3D like Planetary Annihilation so it won't be too much of a shame if the map is flat too.


    The map in Civ V isn't 2D, its rendered in 3D (and even includes tesselated geometry) but with a locked camera angle. If you don't like that, that's fine, but its a design choice and part of the style of the franchise. There's plenty of 4X games with a truly adjustable camera.

    I think I heard that Beyond Earth will include a new map layer for planetary orbit. But I definitely wouldn't hold my breath for a Planetary Annihilation-style camera. If you want that game, play that game.


    BE seems to be more of the same from the screenshots I found from scrolling down the page, but meant 2D as in flat, 3D as in the example of Planetary Annihilation, or a lesser extent Spore which at least tried wrapping the map around.

    CIV 5's map geometry is admirable but it is still flat, static, like a table top.