AMD Mantle BF4 and StarSwarm Testing Part 2 – Overclocking the GPU and CPU

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

The first beta release we tested provided a significant increase in performance when Mantle was enabled, compared to the same test using the DirectX API. In these tests, we overclocked the CPU and GPU to see which would provide any additional performance boost.

Previously when we tested Battlefield 4 at 1080P, we received a 15.8% performance boost. This was slightly higher than the estimated provided by AMD and EA-DICE of 13.28%. While that is a good performance boost from a driver and a game update, overclocking provided an additional boost of 5.5%. When the CPU was overclocked to 4.3GHz and the GPU overclocked to 1255MHz, the performance boost increased to 22.2% when compared to the DirectX API.

For StarSwarm, we received an additional 9.25% boost in performance across all four scenarios when looking at the Mantle performance at stock speeds. Getting close to a 10% performance boost isn’t terrible. With the exception of the Attract scenario, overclocking the CPU did not provide a significant boost in performance. The SHMUP scenario actually showed a negative impact when the CPU was overclocked.

Currently with Catalyst 14.1, Beta 1.6 we have seen some instability issues in Battlefield 4. I was able to play for several hours without any lock-ups, the next time it locked up as soon as I went into the console to enable the new benchmarking tool. The random instability will cause the game to lock up, however it seems to mostly happen when using the console or the game options menus.

Legit Bottom Line: Overclocking the CPU and GPU provides a little additional boost in performance. In Battlefield 4, we received an additional 5.5% performance boost when both were overclocked.