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Battlefield 4 patch thaws freezing bug, smoothes Mantle integration

The Battlefield 4 single player campaign is better than you might think.

Wounds aren’t patched in war – they’re dressed, sutured, or removed in amputations. With enough patches, though, Battlefield 4 might just become the game we’d have liked it to be four months ago. By now it’s covered from head-to-toe in plasters, thanks to a pledge from DICE to drop DLC until the game is fixed – and yesterday’s update was a figurative thermal blanket, designed to stop the game from freezing.

The headline fix has sorted out a ‘sound loop crash’ – or as DICE call it, “the so called sound loop crash”, as if it were nothing to do with sound and wouldn’t know a loop from a roundabout. In any case, Battlefield 4 now has one less cause to freeze, which is good news for fans of not holding your power button until your PC chokes out.

Among general stability improvements, another fix has seen off an issue which sometimes prevented players from shooting in a vehicle’s gunner position, instead becoming rigid, fleshy targets.

Battlefield’s Mantle integration is getting ever better, too. Expect to see further stability and performance refinement – and an end to the problem that saw the sky become either too bright or too dark when Mantle was in use.

Just this morning, we were learning about Microsoft’s challenge to AMD’s Mantle – new DirectX dev tools designed to “squeeze every last drop of performance out of your PC”. Have you considered a switch in graphics cards just to see Battlefield run many percent faster?