Battlefield 4 Benchmarks: Entry-Level Graphics
Next, the Radeon R7 250X and GeForce GTX 650 demonstrate what lower-end discrete cards can do. We put pressure on them by increasing the detail preset to High and increase resolution to 1920x1080.
Alright, there are a lot of bars and a lot of lines in the two charts above. But what they're basically telling us is that Mantle hurts performance, rather than helps.
We contacted AMD about our numbers, and company representatives let us know that Battlefield 4 has a specific issue with Mantle that is triggered on cards with less than 4 GB of memory. The Radeon R7 250X we tested has 1 GB. The GeForce GTX 650 has 2 GB, though of course that's not Mantle-compatible. I'll get into more depth on the issue shortly. But for now, let's have a look at frame time variance.
Variance is in the acceptable range; none of the cards demonstrate more than 3 ms at the 95th percentile. There are a few spikes, but nothing to cause alarm.