Well, the Mantle vs DirectX review site comparisons are beginning to surface. This german site shows a 2x to 3x increase using Mantle...

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.golem.de%2Fnews%2Famds-mantle-api-im-test-der-prozessor-katalysator-1402-104261-4.html&sandbox=1

It would appear that us regular peeps will see the Mantle/Catalyst 14.2 drivers sometime today, probably sometime this afternoon... note that you will need an AMD GCN GPU to take advantage of the Mantle drivers - the rest of us are still stuck with DirectX!

My Test Run of the Stress Test. pretty amazing differences just watching it and seeing the performance gains with Mantle enabled. WOW !

GigaByte69

Well, that's impressive.

I've noticed that Star Swarm crashes or even causes a bluescreen of death when my CPU is overclocked. In windows 7, BSODs aren't even supposed to happen and if they do it shouldn't be anything but hardware. Still I've ran other stress tests on the CPU while overclocked for 12 hours at a time without any problems, and I daily play other games (Natural selection 2, Planetside 2, Endless Space, Battlefield 4 and so on). This crash/reboot occurs in DirectX mode, I haven't tried it in mantle. Right now I'm inclined to blame the engine. I'll run some more tests outside Star Swarm.

So you did not run those stress test on right settings.... it happened to me to. I OC´ed my CPU to 3,9Ghz and ran Intel Burn Test on certain settings and it completed just fine... but then i played CoD and on occasion, after one or 2 hours of gameplay time, booom - BSOD. So i inquired a little on Anandtech forums and i was told i shall be running the stress test on different settings, since the ones i used are not as "stressful". So i did and the test gave me error right away this time around....that moment i knew i have to either underclock the CPU somewhat or bump the voltage.

Nitrous is the first 3D engine to use multicore rendering.  So it's going to push your graphics card in ways it hasn't before.  When I run it here, it makes my fans go nuts.

I'll just remove the overclock on the CPU for now, it's not doing me any good anyway. Star Swarm runs fine without it on mantle and DirectX. It was more that I was curious what the difference would be between a 4670k on 3.4 ghz and a 4670k on 4.2ghz (with a radeon 7990 behind it).

The reason I was interested in that is that Star Swarm seems very uneven in how it uses my GPU. It'll go up to 100% sometimes, and sometimes it'll stay around 60%. So I imagine the CPU was bottlenecking at the 60% point.

Could this pushing of the fans cause issues for laptop gaming down the road?

I'd imagine that if the game designers push things too far with their game releases, and GPUs start catching fire left and right, that there could be a class action suit involved...

That being said, I don't see people running a stress benchmark 24/7/365, so I think the Oxide guys are safe for now...

I finally ditched my unstable i7 920 with damaged motherboard system for an A10-7850K, good to see Mantle doin its thing.  I hope you guys will use the hybrid GPU support in it for something or other (and TrueAudio as well!)

(Still using the GeForce 660 until I can upgrade that though so no Mantle for me...yet.)

I'm surprised to see the hostility on the related TechReport comments....some good points are raised but some of those guys...wow.  Seems like I haven't seen people this wound up in ten years!

But hey, can't blame people for being excited.  I'm excited. 

The exciting thing is the concept of using your otherwise 'unused' 7850K integrated GPU for physics calculations and such in games, while your R9 290(x), assuming you end up with one of those, does the heavy lifting!  This is one thing that I've seen mentioned several times now r.e. Mantle.

I've seen some Crossfire results already using a R7-240 and R7-250, and there was a performance bump.  In that case, the integrated R7 was able to help out a lot.  But the whole point of the HSA/HuMA architecture is to allow programmers to use the integrated GPU cores more easily/readily for other things, like number crunching.

Indeed, I never wanted a CPU with an integrated GPU until now.

I know adoption might be limited in that regards for a while, but it's cool anyway.

And the GPU I'm likely to get for Mantle probably won't have TrueAudio but my integrated does so hey.  I've long been disappointed with PC gaming audio so that's one of my favorite features.

Holy F$%@! $#@% just got REAL!

Brad, we need a real time cam feed inside Stardock to see all the crazy stuff your doing with this RIGHT NOW!

Just sayin...

Was there a general "UGH" reaction when seeing this and knowing you where too far along in Gal Civ 3 development to use it, or was it still a conscious choice to use what you have now?

I'm having a hard time playing Sins now knowing what its future could be!

Excited for future games from Stardock!

Brad, were you guys going to release more documentation about modding Star Swarm? Cause, you know, kind of hard to reproduce the Battle of Coruscant if we can't insert correct looking models.

I have also done it in D3D using my Catalyst 14.2

I got 100+ fps before major shooting started and 35 to 45 when all .... broke loose.

The fun of having multiple GPUs.