For those who have AMD gpu's and apu's, the long awaited mantle drivers have finally arrived. It was supposed to be released earlier but AMD found a bug in it so they delayed it for a day or two. The press release was already out and they are very impressed with it. Thanks to this technology, you'll get a free boost in most of your games ;) So give it a try and post your impressions/results here if you want .

Downlad Link

List of supported cards, since it's too long to post here. (gog should add a spoiler option to short out long lists :p)
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=386270

Interesting. Any compatibility fixes of note in 14.1?

Also, there don't seem to be any games that are supporting Mantle right now, so it's difficult to really gauge performance.

Overall it's an stable driver but you should scroll down to see the resolved issue and known issue list :p BF4 still has some room for optimization and some OpenGl games might do some weird things with this driver.
Also for people who want to know more about Mantle technology, click here

Its a Beta driver....
And in the detail it only supports R9.R7, HD7000 and up (rules out a lot of older cards like mine - HD5670)

I always download amd beta drivers without any issues....
And yes for the moment it and this card does support 5600 series, but Mantle technology is currently supported on the high end cards....

One of the biggest problems my PC has is that my Phenom X4 920 seems to bottleneck my HD 7870 considerably, especially in poorly-optimised and/or CPU-intensive games like Crysis 1 and Sleeping Dogs.

Upgrading my HD 4890 to a HD 7870 a year ago doesn't really seem to have been worth it - the only game I've really seen noticeable improvements in is Alan Wake (although I obviously can't speak for what I've bought after installing the card) - and since I don't actually buy all that many PC games nowadays, upgrading the motherboard and CPU doesn't really seem worth it either.

In that regard, Mantle is an interesting prospect, as it reduces the load on the CPU that the abstraction operations of DirectX and OpenGL place upon it.

Anyone know of a site which helps match cpu + gpu?. always wanted to know about that.. especially since intel and amd never seem to agree on cpu performance (and its hard for buyers to figure out whats what..)

I have no idea what this mantle thing is but if I have an R9270x should i download this thing? and if so what is it going to do?

Mhh I don't know I have an HD7870 (xfx) and it might not be the best card out there but for the money I paid, I'm getting great results. I can go ultra on most games with 60 fps and Vsync enabled. The only problem I have is the 2 or 4 times MSAA or SSAA that will eat up the fps. Also do you play a lot of modern games? Otherwise you will see GREAT improvements, especially coming from HD4980....

And yeah the cpu bottleneck can indeed be a pain and it affects almost all high end cards. Although apu's have improved a lot over the years and I must say AMD is doing a great job and is supporting more and more modern games. Almost all Square Enix titles run, look and play flawlessly on AMD cards...

But if you play older games, you won't see any wow effect. read the link in the post if you want detailed info ;)
http://www.gog.com/forum/general/amd_catalyst_141_driver_aka_mantle_driver_is_finally_out/post3
On short Mantle is a low-level API specification developed by AMD as an alternative to Direct3D and OpenGL, primarily for use on the PC platform.[2] Currently the only implementation is for graphics processing units with AMD's Graphics Core Next architecture.[3] Mantle was created to allow games and applications to utilize the GPU more efficiently, and have much faster draw calls, and makes game development much easier by nearly eliminating hardware abstraction.- Wiki

Please read the known issue section before you download and try it out but you should see improvements on DX games as well.

There is no real site that does it but you should always look up your cpu and gpu match. If you just google it (or ask someone here) you'll see 1000 of results since there are more people who have bought it. Both cpu and apu's are great and both companies have created a great line of products. There will always be discussion of nvidia is better than amd, intel is better than amd or whatever. People will find the product they use the best.

GPU bottleneck will only occur if you buy a high end gpu card and use an 2-3 year old cpu that is slower than you gpu. Otherwise patching most recent cpu's and gpu's you won't see any problem (there are exceptions off course)