Read my earlier response.

No problem.  Sorry if I came across as cranky. I was writing from the plane from a very lengthy trip.

It's a cool benchmark but it's not a good benchmark to test your computers since different things happen every time you run it. There's a huge variance in all tests except the RTS test, and that still has significant differences from run to run.

I'm not sure which is more painless these days, a one-time phone home or an activation.  Both are pretty painless, though I hope GalCiv3 doesn't require the second activation that other Stardock games on Steam have (it seems pointless now- only a minor nuisance, but still pointless since Steam does that and there is no non-Steam version anymore)

I can understand why Stardock keeps its current system- it's perfect for their non-game stuff.  It just seems anachronistic for games with Steamworks running everything now. (though that said, it is good insurance in case Steam goes under or evil)

Mantle and a potential for easier next-gen console porting is why I went AMD for my current rig.   I'm really hoping that I don't need to buy a console again in the future.

Because we wanted to test the Nitrous engine in DirectX? Remember half of us are probably sitting on Nvidia cards and thus waiting for Mantle drivers "seems silly".

Also, if you read between the lines: Both Battlefield 4 and Star Swarm released their Mantle-supporting products the same day. This, to me, implies that AMD had in fact scheduled Mantle drivers to be released at that date, and tried to synchronize it with BF4 (and Star swarm). They got delayed, as happens.

Mantle driver released  http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop?os=Windows+7+-+64