AMD Mantle & TrueAudio Patch for THIEF Tested

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

In the limited time we had with the new beta driver and Thief patch, we were able to see a noticeable performance difference when using the integrated benchmark. As time was running short, we did not have time to overclock the CPU or GPU to see if that makes a difference. In our previous testing, with Battlefield 4 and StarSwarm we saw an additional boost to performance when the CPU and GPU was overclocked; so we expect that overclocking would provide additional performance here.

When we started testing Thief patch 1.3 and Catalyst 14.3, AMD provided us with results of their in-house testing. These scores ranged from 5% up to 24% performance boost with Mantle depending on the quality settings. While our testing did not receive scores up to 24%, a 21.26% performance boost from a driver update and game patch to implement Mantle is hard to beat.

In addition to testing Mantle, we were also able to give TrueAudio a chance. Thief is the first game to implement TrueAudio, TrueAudio offloads sound from the CPU to dedicated audio chips on the video card. Thief implements it to calculate “convolution reverb”, which is a technique to simulate noise in a real-life environment, this causes realistic echos which can be a little disconcerting at first. We are so used to playing games without realistic echos that when we hear it from a game it sounds wierd. However that fades very quickly and the noises of the game draws you in.

When switching between Mantle and no Mantle support, occasionally Thief would crash before getting into the game. While any crash is a hassle, most people probably won’t be switching between the two settings as frequently as we were during the testing.

Legit Bottom Line: Receiving a double digit boost in performance is hard to beat, especially when it is provided through a simple driver update and game patch. So far, both games that support Mantle have shown a good increase in performance once Mantle is implemented. TrueAudio has a lot of potential, Thief’s implementation with echos can make a game much more realistic. Hopefully more games will implement Mantle and TrueAudio as they mature.