AMD Mantle adds 23% Performance Boost to Thief, TrueAudio blows mind, Get Thief starting $14 STEAM KEY

AMD has brought in Mantle for Thief and boy, is it impressive. Today also marks the day when AMD debuts the first public demo of its TrueAudio technology. Also, 5% discount coupon for THIEF below!

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We’re going to focus on a hands-on comparison of two platforms using two midrange GPUS — the R9 270 and the R7 260X. AMD has released a great deal of supplementary information regarding its own performance expectations, however, so we’ll refer to that to flesh out our analysis in several respects.

This time, we’ve chosen CPU and GPU configurations that are more likely to represent what people at home are playing with or contemplating for future purchases. Improving the performance of the R9 290 and R9 290X is important for competitive positioning against Nvidia, but the number of people with an A10-7850K and an R9 290X is quite small. The R7 260X and R9 270 (and the HD 7790 and HD 7850 they replaced), on the other hand, are two of AMD’s most common mass-market GPUs. So, what can owners of these products expect?

Mantle under Thief

We tested two configurations: The Intel Core i3-4330 and the AMD A10-7850K using both the R7 260X and the R9 270. Windows 8.1 was installed on both systems with all appropriate patches. AMD’s latest Catalyst 14.3 beta driver was installed. Thief has a built-in benchmark and we used it for testing; programs like Fraps can’t monitor a Mantle application for frame rates yet. Game details were set to Very High Quality, but with two changes: SSAA (Super-sampled antialiasing) was disabled, while anisotropic filtering was bumped to 16x.

VisionTek CryoVenom AMD Radeon R9 290 Review - The GPU with a Warranty

Liquid cooling solves the thermal challenges presented by AMD's Hawaii GPU much more elegantly than a big heat sink and loud fan. But the requisite parts also add cost. Does VisionTek's CryoVenom R9 290 deliver maximum performance at a fair price?

Enthusiasts are the folks who appreciate the benefits of lower temperatures, and most of us also put high value on less noise, too. The fight between cooling performance and acoustic pollution became particularly acute in AMD’s Radeon R9 290 graphics cards. More so, even, when the company was forced to override its firmware-based fan ramp through a driver in order to deliver consistent clock rates.

Where we once saw performance variance as large as 15% from one board to the next, that “fix” still has us finding variations up to 5% caused by slight changes in room temperature.

Most of us would pay to avoid those issues, and the $400 Radeon R9 290 was supposed to be cheap enough to encourage value-minded adoption of high-end graphics hardware. But in our search for an answer to the 290’s reference cooling woes, many of us forget to ask the right question: how much would we be willing to spend on better performance and lower noise, while giving up our warranty coverage? Based on today's online prices, water block manufacturer EK thinks the answer is around $120 (add $30 for the back cover).

VisionTek does its math a little differently. On the product page of its CryoVenom R9 290, the company values your time building a water-cooled R9 290 at $100, as you also sacrifice its warranty. The marketing gets a little fuzzier as VisionTek calculates that a $120 cooler, a $30 back cover, and your $100 of time pushes the cost of a $400 Radeon R9 290 to $651.

Even if you disagree with those numbers, though, a do-it-yourself configuration with an original $400 card, the EK cooler, and the company's backplate would cost at least as much as the original $550 VisionTek CryoVenom R9 290.

Right now, some of you are probably thinking that a $550 liquid-cooled Radeon R9 290 would be one heck of a deal in a market loaded with $600 air-cooled cards, and you’d be right. Acknowledging the crazy market pricing for Hawaii-based Radeons, VisionTek admits it needs to charge more to cover cost increases on certain board components. As a result, the company recently bumped its CryoVenom up to $600 for new orders.

As of this writing, the CryoVenom R9 290 isn't available to order, though. So, there's no way for us to know if that $600 price tag is going to hold up over time. What we do know is that the cheapest R9 290s go for $550 on Newegg, so you'd still be getting $150 worth of liquid-cooling equipment and a one-year warranty at a substantial discount. But again, that's simply not something we can vouch for on a card you can't buy right now.

Steam OS Newest Alchemist Beta Update is LIVE – Includes AMD 14.1 Mantle API Drivers

“Steam OS” has just received the Alchemist Beta Update 93 with the newer AMD 14.1 Drivers, the same drivers which house the Mantle API.

The latest Alchemist Beta Update for Steam OS has rolled out and along with it brought the 14.1 Beta AMD Drivers along with some other improvements.

This latest ‘Alchemist Beta Update’ can be downloaded from here.

The “Steam OS” update not only adds AMD’s 14.1 Beta Drivers but interestingly it also adds Mantle API, which the change log does not mention explicitly, but is readily deduced from the fact that 14.1′s critical component is Mantle API. 

Considering that in all probability “Steam OS” finally has the much coveted Mantle API it appears that it is moving in the right direction. It also means that two of the potential game changers (“Steam OS” and Mantle API) are now coming in one packaging. Do keep in mind however that though the AMD 14.1 update includes Mantle API getting it to actually run, or support thereof on the world’s first Gaming OS, might be a whole different story. The fact that the change log does not explicitly state that doesn’t help either.

Anyways, the Update also comes with specific instructions: “AMD graphics users, please make sure to reboot as soon as the “SteamOS” reboot required’ notification pops up after the driver update is applied. Otherwise you most likely will be unable to play any games until you do” said Valve engineer Pierre-Loup.

This is what the full Changelog of the “Steam OS” Alchemist Update reads:

• Fixed a critical APT bug resulting in packages sometimes being erroneously erased during updates (many thanks to Michael Vogt and Simon McVittie)
• Added support for detecting hybrid configurations and using the driver corresponding to the primary VGA output by default
• Fixed a bug where “Preparing hardware drivers…” would be erroneously printed during startup
• Preinstalled all the languages that are supported by Steam client to enable a localized SteamOS desktop
• Fixed lightdm so the desktop Region and Languages control panel can change the per-user language
• Fixed “Metro: Last Light” on Intel graphics by backporting GLX support for ARB_create_context from newer X servers
• Added Thai and CJK fonts
• Fixed steamcompmgr to properly focus “CID the Dummy”
• Updated AMD graphics driver to 1:14.1~beta1.3-1 from Debian jessie
• Updated gnutls26, file, xserver-xorg-video-intel packages to incorporate upstream Debian fixes