AMD Mantle delayed due to Battlefield 4 bugs

Battlefield 4 has been having a bit of a miserable time since it launched back in 2013.

The game is riddled with bugs on all platforms, and the China Rising expansion only served to introduce more problems. This lead to developer DICE shelving further expansion pack launches until they have suitably fixed the game.

The problems with the game and the shelving of expansion packs has escalated the situation into publisher EA being sued by investors in a class-action lawsuit.

This state of affairs has also landed AMD in a tricky situation, as DICE was their main partner on their Mantle API project and Battlefield 4 was intended to be the title to introduce Mantle to the gaming world.

Mantle was planned to be patched into the PC version of Battlefield 4 in December, but AMD has now issued a statement explaining that the Mantle patch rollout will be delayed while DICE focusses on patching up its litany of bugs.

After much consideration, the decision was made to delay the Mantle patch for Battlefield 4. AMD continues to support DICE on the public introduction of Mantle, and we are tremendously excited about the coming release for Battlefield 4! We are now targeting a January release and will have more information to share in the New Year.

Mantle is the result of a collaboration between AMD and DICE, which AMD is now running with. The low-level API intends to give developers more direct access to hardware and therefore offer performance gains, on top of some fancy new resource handling techniques. For a good overview of the Mantle technology, read this article: AMD Mantle API poised to revolutionise PC gaming

You can catch up with the Battlefield 4 bug-busting progress over on the BF4 control room. At the time of writing, the latest BF4 patch was rolled out to all platforms on 20 December.