AMD today joins Firaxis Games in celebrating the release of Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth, which features day-one support for AMD’s Mantle graphics API to enable top gaming performance for AMD Radeon graphics customers.
“AMD Radeon GPUs with Mantle are over a year ahead of other graphics companies in delivering high-throughput, high-efficiency graphics to gamers and developers,” said Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager, Product and Platform Solutions Business Unit, AMD. “As gamers settle in for a marathon session of Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth, we’re proud that the potent combination of Mantle and the award-winning Graphics Core Next architecture effortlessly enable the definitive experience.”
Mantle is a “low-overhead” graphics API that can help improve performance for gamers by making better use of multi-core CPUs, streamlining game code execution, virtually eliminating software bottlenecks and utilizing GPU resources with incredible efficiency.
In performance testing, the AMD Radeon R9 290X GPU with Mantle rendered Sid Meier’s Civilization®: Beyond Earth at higher frame rates than any other single-GPU graphics card. Gamers looking to secure Mantle’s blistering performance for their own empires can do so today with the purchase of an AMD Radeon R9 or R7 Series GPU starting at just $99.
Select AMD Radeon graphic cards are based on the GCN Architecture and include its associated features (AMD PowerTune technology, AMD ZeroCore Power technology, PCI Express 3.0, etc.). Not all features are supported by all products—check with your system manufacturer for specific model capabilities. Mantle application support is required.
In Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth internal benchmark test at 3840×2160, the AMD Radeon R9 290X 8GB with Mantle outperforms the GeForce GTX 980 with DirectX 11, NVIDIA’s highest-performing single-GPU graphics card as of October 20, 2014, by 45.38 average FPS to 44.89 average FPS using the Ultra in-game preset with 8xAA. Test system: Intel Core i7-4960X, 16GB DDR3-1866, Asus SABERTOOTH X79, Windows 8.1 x64, AMD Catalyst 14.9.2 Beta and ForceWare 344.16 WHQL.
