According to a CES AMD press meetup was the details on the AMD Catalyst 14.1 beta drivers that will feature both Mantle and TrueAudio APIs. Other things that supposedly the AMD Catalyst 14.1 beta drivers will include are discrete AMD Radeon GPUs, APUs, and core-logic chipsets. Now the biggest being AMD Mantle and TrueAudio. What is Mantle and TrueAudio you ask? Well let me give you a run down of both AMD Mantle and TrueAudio but before we move on a date of release has not been given but a broad Q1 2014 but other sources have said within a month.
AMD Mantle
AMD Mantle in a nutshell is basically an API designed by AMD to unifiy its products that use the Graphics Next Core (GNC). One of the biggest headaches with developers on the PC platform is fragmentation of hardware. Unlike consoles that all have the same hardware (AMD built SoCs for Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo) you have a vast amount of different manufacturers, chipsets, models, ect to mix and match to build your ideal PC. With Mantle and the GNC this will be able to unify how developers can build software to streamline the process of how your hardware utilizes said software. So Mantle is essentially taking optimization to the extremes. You can read more here about AMD Mantle on its webpage.
AMD TrueAudio
AMD’s TrueAudio API is positional audio DSP that the goal is help developers make more realistic sounds in game. You can read more about AMD TrueAudio here.
What will make AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta Drivers worth downloading?
With both Mantle and TrueAudio you will see improvements in game such as Battlefield 4, that currently is the only major game to use the API if you are using GNC hardware which include AMD Radeon HD 7000 series, R7 series, R9 series currently for GPUs. Frame pacing is suppose to see a boost in performance also. Now the claims being made is a potential 45% jump in performance for games and titles that use Mantle (which we hope so) this could definitely be a game changer for AMD.
