Reports all over the web indicate that AMD's next Catalyst driver, Catalyst 14.1 Beta, will carry the Mantle API. Based on the numbering of this driver, it is due for release sometime later this month. So far we've heard great things about Mantle, but never have seen it in action.
Mantle is an API that is intended to rival Direct3D and OpenGL, and while it's optimized for the Graphics Core Next architecture, it allows much more direct access to the hardware, allowing significant performance improvements. A recent slide leak shows that Battlefield 4 will have a performance improvement of up to 45 percent. The corner of the slide shows that this was observed on a system running with an AMD A10-7850K Kaveri APU along with an AMD Radeon R9 290X graphics card.
Are these reports accurate? We don't know, but we certainly can hope so!