AMD spent up to $8m on Battlefield 4 deal – report

Graphics card manufacturer AMD spent between $5m and $8m to secure its Battlefield 4 partnership, a new report has claimed.

Fudzilla claims to have word from multiple sources” that the company spent the huge sum to not only secure the game’s bundling with its new range of graphics cards but also to convince EA to make a Mantle-friendly version of the PC shooter.

Mantle was revealed last week and is a new toolset that supposedly allows developers more direct access and control of a graphics card’s architecture. It is being sold as a method to extract more performance form PC hardware than has until now been available.

The PC version of Battlefield 4, which releases on November 1st, will ship with Mantle support, giving AMD what it believes is a key marketing edge over rival Nvidia on what will be one of the biggest PC releases of the year.

AMD last week announced its next generation of graphics cards with the $599 R9 290X leading the pack. The top-level card is expected to rival or even surpass Nvidia’s $999 GTX Titan in performance terms, although we’re yet to see any benchmarks.