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Then, at the NVIDIA G-Sync technology reveal in Montreal, I ran into him again and our discussion focused around performance testing under Mantle. I met Johan Andersson, Technical Director at DICE, several years ago but got some significant time to talk with him during the AMD Hawaii product announcement event. Luckily, there was another option for us to pursue. To be clear, I have asked AMD in the past to build a universal Mantle API overlay option, but they haven't indicated must interest in the matter. When I started our Mantle testing it became apparent that the overlay options we had (from NVIDIA, from others) would not work, as I had originally expected and expressed concern to AMD. NVIDIA helped develop that with its FCAT release and they have made progressive optimization and improvements to it over time.
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The first hurdle for this testing process is that software overlay. This allows us to find the average frame rate but also to find how smoothly the frames are presented, if there are dropped frames and if there are jitter or stutter issues. With that video file captured, we then analyze it frame by frame, measuring the length of each of those colored bars, how long they are on the screen, how consistently they are displayed. Using a secondary system, we capture the output from the graphics card directly, intercepting it from the display output, in real-time in an uncompressed form. On the local system with the hardware being evaluated we run a small piece of software called an overlay that draws small colored bars on the left hand side of the game screen that change successively with each frame rendered by the game. Rather than using software on the machine being tested to measure performance, our Frame Rating system uses a combination of local software and external capture hardware. Though complicated to fully explain, the basics are pretty simple. Terms like frame pacing, stutter, jitter and runts were not in the vocabulary of most enthusiasts but became an important part of the story just about one year ago. In late 2012 and throughout 2013, testing graphics cards became a much more complicated beast.
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Today we are happy to announce we have full support for our Frame Rating and FCAT testing with BF4 running under Mantle. Instead we were forced to use an in-game frame rate counter built by DICE which worked fine, but didn't give us the fine grain data we really wanted to put the platform to the test. First and foremost, our primary graphics testing methodology, called Frame Rating, wasn't able to be integrated due to the change of API. When I did my first performance preview of BF4 with Mantle on February 1st, the results were mixed but we had other issues to deal with.
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Even though the release was a bit later than AMD had promised us, coming at the end of January 2014, one of the biggest PC games on the market today had integrated a proprietary AMD API. Without diving too much into the politics of the release, the fact that Battlefield 4 developer DICE was integrating Mantle into the Frostbite engine for Battlefield was a huge proof point for the technology.
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