Corners of the Internet have been all aflutter with excitement AMD's 'Mantle' technology, exclusive to its latest graphics cards, but no one knew quite how much of a difference it would make. Battlefield 4 has become the first game to support Mantle, thanks to a patch launched yesterday, and it's looking pretty good. DICE has reported FPS boosts of up to 58% in specific circumstances.

AMD's plan with the Mantle API is to make more efficient use of a PC's hardware. In games written to take advantage of Mantle, it allows overburdened processors to shift some work to the video card's own processors. It also gives games more-direct access to the GPU, rather than going through slower APIs like OpenGL and DirectX. In short, games which are limited by CPU speed will be less so, and everything should run smoother in general.

Battlefield 4 now supports the Mantle API, and DICE has run a few tests. It found performance boosts of 14-58%, testing on three different PCs on different levels. Those lowest and highest scores came from single-player levels, which a spot of multiplayer found a 25% boost.

DICE noted, "It is important to point out that on PC there are of course many different types of CPU, GPU and OS configurations as well as the workload in the game is highly varying throughout both single-player and in multi-player, so one can't say say a single fixed number of how much faster it is."

AMD will roll out Mantle support to users with the Catalyst 14.1 drivers, due to launch soon.

Other games already announced as supporting Mantle include Star Citizen and Sniper Elite 3. Unfortunately, the fact that it's specific to one manufacturer's video card will ultimately limit Mantle's spread and success, but it'll surely be welcomed by all with AMD cards.