 Nantel, in a nutshell, is AMD's initiative to create a new programming model to fully exploit the capabilities of modern GPUs to improve graphics performance. That's directly from their literature. The Cooler Master Glacier 240L CPU Cooler delivers the convenience of an all-in-one and the performance of a custom water cooler. Click now to learn more. The idea is to give developers the ability to have their game engines interact directly with the hardware to reduce unnecessary overhead. To take advantage of Nantel right now, you'll need a GCN architecture AMD Radeon graphics card with a Nantel-compatible driver and a Nantel-ready game. At the moment, the only game commercially available is Battlefield 4, but AMD also has a benchmark called Star Swarm that was built using the Oxide engine that you can download on Steam. Now, performance with Nantel is a bit of a complicated story. It is supposed to improve performance, but it's not that simple. So I'm going to hand the video over to Luke, who has spent the better part of a week testing multiple CPU platforms, multiple graphics cards, multiple benchmarking segments within Battlefield 4, and generally going on a voyage of discovery about this exciting new technology from AMD. Without further ado, I'll let him take it away. The original purpose of this video was actually to go on the Steam hardware survey and figure out what a lot of people were running, and we were then going to benchmark those cards and those setups to figure out what tangible benefit people would get now with Nantel. That didn't really work out so well, and I'll get into that more later on, but for now we'll go into what actually we ended up doing to actually get the results that we were hoping to. I changed from storming the beach on the Singapore level, like I normally do with Battlefield 4 benchmarks, and went to the broken flight deck. This is a little bit more CPU intensive than the Singapore level is, and better representation of Nantel. And we're trying to find better representations of Nantel in Battlefield 4, so it kind of made sense. The 3960x, 290x platform that I was running for this performed quite well, and with the DirectX 11 to Nantel comparison, when both of them were overclocked, we got about a 13% improvement going to Nantel. That's very solid for just switching the settings in your video settings. But when we tried something that a few people have been trying, which is underclocking their CPU to see what kind of performance gains they'll get then, we moved the 3960x to 2 GHz and saw a 20% improvement, which is a lot more solid. Although I don't see this being that tangible, because the availability of really high-end, powerful CPUs these days is making it so that not that many people actually have weak CPUs. The price per performance of CPUs is quite solid, so most people, even in the budget end, are coming out with pretty solid CPUs far above the 2 GHz range that I set that CPU to. So back to the Steam Hardware Survey. I ran a ton of different stuff based on the information that we got from the Steam Hardware Survey. So that went from Radeon 7770s to 7850s to 7970s to R9 290xs, and then the CPUs, we went from 3960xs to 4670ks to Kaveri CPUs. I had tons of different setups and mixes and stuff going on, and that felt as random and ridiculous as the results I got from those setups, which didn't make a ton of sense. Now, I don't know where to throw blame at for this. There's a fairly new patch from EA for Battlefield. There's a new beta driver from AMD. There's me testing on different levels in Battlefield. There's FRAPS and the built-in tool in Battlefield recording the FPS. There's tons of different stuff going on, but either way, these results were not properly representative of the platform, and I know that for sure, because there are certain setups that should have, no matter what, been above certain ones that they were not. So these numbers were not valid, and I'm not showing them, and hopefully, if you're watching this in the future, all of those things have been resolved. And that's why I'm not showing them, is because if you watch in the future and I show all these problems and they're fixed, then it's not very well applicable. Another thing to note if you're running these benchmarks on your own, the best results are shown on GCN 1.1. That is the 290 series, the 260 series, and the 7790. If you are running on GCN 1.0, that's, say, the 7000 series graphics cards, Mantle still works fine. You'll still see improvements in especially the very specialized situations like Star Storm, which we'll talk about later, but it won't be quite as nice as the improvements you'll see on GCN 1.1. Another thing to note might be that Battlefield 4 isn't actually, in my opinion, the best representation of Mantle. To really show Mantle off, you need a lot more CPU horsepower under there, pushing the CPU as hard as you possibly can, and with that, enter Star Storm. Star Storm is an entirely another beast. This thing will punish your CPU as much as it possibly can, and that's perfect to show off Mantle. So we tried this out in a ton of different ways, and you can see in every different way I tried it out, the simple switch over to Mantle just completely destroyed it in a way that speaks more than just the numbers. This can actually unlock different types of games. People can start developing things for Mantle that they weren't able to develop before. Maybe it's still in RTS, but it's on a completely different level, because each individual guy can have their own very highly advanced AI, and you can have thousands of these little individual guys. Imagine playing an RTS with thousands of little minions, but having them all be very advanced AI. That's something interesting to think about. We even have games coming up in the near future that are already planned that can take huge advantage of Mantle, like Star Citizen. There's going to be huge amounts of ships in one small area with AI-controlled turrets, with AI manning different systems within your ship that is in this giant system, and it's going to be nuts. There's projectiles flying all over the place, and Mantle will definitely help there. As always, check out the sticky end of the PC gaming session on the forum. Join the organization. We're currently in third place for total members, and we're getting close to second, so be sure to join. Are you excited for this type of thing? Are you excited for Mantle? Are you excited for the games that will be able to come out with Mantle? Are you excited for the performance that Mantle can unlock for you? Comment down below. As always, like and dislike the video, depending on your mood, and subscribe to Linus Tech Tips to see all of our other awesome content. Thanks for watching.