EXCLUSIVE: Thief patch date confirmed, Mantle and TrueAudio incoming
 

AMD, Nixxes, and Eidos-Montreal have been working on implementing Mantle and TrueAudio support in the PC version of Thief for some time now, and it's finally coming to fruition: AMD and Eidos-Montreal have confirmed to us the patch enabling these features will go live Tuesday, March 18.

For those unfamiliar, Mantle is an API that offers higher framerates and lower frame time latency thanks to its programmer-friendly low-impact design; TrueAudio improves audio depth while reducing load on your CPU and RAM. You can find out more about the latter here.

I'll have much more information to share on Mantle and TrueAudio in Thief soon when our upcoming testing article goes live. In the meantime, check out our tech review if you haven't yet.

would be nice to know whether they intend to come up with a working Crossfire profile, because right now the only way to make the game playable is disable second GPU.
Nice going for a title advertised as Crossfire ready :up:

^I can tell you that Tuesday.

You're kind of early for April Fool's, Sean.

:p

What? :nuts:

2x Windforce 7950s in Crossfire, usually 99% usage on both cards, no lag or anything. Worked perfectly out of the box with crossfire. :nuts:

don't know what to tell you. what drivers are you using? OS? Do you have latest Thief patch installed?
The stuttering issue is widespread among multi-GPU platforms, as many forums report.
Glad for you.

Using latest drivers as always especially when a new game comes out. (Latest Beta's of course).
Windows 7 64bit ultimate, 64bit Thief exe.
I have vsync turned off so maybe that would cause issues if you have it on?
Yeah gonna have to call pebkac on those forum posts. Don't forget, these same forums also complained about long load times, over 6 minutes in some posts, for the first mission to load.
I'm running this game on a crappy 3TB WD drive and my game loaded in 30 seconds or so.
Even when running a virus scan with malwarebytes in the background, my load times were still less then 2 minutes.

I have an average system with an ancient i7 930 @ 4.1 Ghz, nothing exotic here.

is your game patched to the latest?
Vsync off, nor any other ingame setting makes any difference at all, I can play only with Crossfire disabled.
Nice, eh? :bleh:

Of course, game is on Steam, auto patches as soon as it's available.

Wooo excellent news!

Will the existing AMD drivers (latest betas) play nice with this or will we need a new driver from AMD to make the most of the patch?

a new beta should come out next week.

Me, I'm curious to see how much the hit from TrueAudio when running it on the CPU. Hope it's not something "a-la Physx", with the game becoming unplayable.

TrueAudio works with a r9 290/290x or a r7 260 I don't think it will do anything without the proper card

Just like PhysX, I understand it can be enabled anyway, but will run on the CPU if you don't have a GPU with TrueAudio DSP.

In which case my question is whether performance will suffer greatly in a similar way as when you enable PhysX and no Nvidia GPU is present (stutters and lags that make the game unplayable).

source ?

first I've herd about it running on a cpu

the new apu's yes
http://www.amd.com/us/products/deskt...eries-apu.aspx

but I won't plan on it till I see it, I still think not having a new gpu i'm SOL for trueaudio

Thanks Lurk, I have also read that if you don't have a supported card then you can chose to offload it to the CPU.

Not sure if that's correct and the sites are crossing wires but I have my fingers crossed.

Awesome! At 50hrs in, I am loving this game! Will it play nice with my savegames is the question!

I read it here:

http://www.legitreviews.com/amd-mant...ch-18th_137560

don't see it in review
http://www.legitreviews.com/amd-mant...h-thief_137644

I tend to agree with that.