Battlefield 3 Benchmark

All major game reviewers gave Battlefield 3 huge scores, it averages above 9.0, at least for PC. Battlefield 3 really takes first persons shooters to another level, just like Crysis did back in 2007. DICE hit the jackpot with the new Frostbite 2 game engine, almost everything about the game feels and looks great. I’m sure PC owners are happy about the involvement developers put on the platform. The BETA was a great way to test the game and make sure our computers are ready for the leap forward. Since the Beta was over, DICE announced they did a lot of updates.

First the operating system comparison. Since Battlefield 3 left behind DirectX 9, Windows XP is not supported. When Just Cause 2 was released a lot of players were annoyed it didn’t support Windows XP, this was more than a year ago and it isn’t really a issue today since Microsoft stopped supporting it a while ago and we showed that games tend to perform better in Windows 7 (See this article).

The frame rate isn’t really great and we haven’t even tested at 1080p resolution. Despite the low FPS, Battlefield 3 was playable and I didn’t encounter any hiccups while playing. I personally look for the 60 FPS Nirvana with almost all games but I can’t really say I had problems or couldn’t play at all at 30 FPS with Battlefield 3.

Performance is the same across all tested operating systems. This stops people from saying that the 64bit version of any operating system performs better than the 32bit one. While this is generally true, it isn’t the case with Battlefield 3.

If you read this article you saw that CPU was an important factor if you wanted best performance at ultra settings. Since then things changed a lot apparently. While Battlefield 3 doesn’t start on a single core processor anymore, the final version of the game isn’t CPU bound, or at least this is what the tests showed. OC = 4.5 GHZ

	Battlefield 3 CPU Usage
2 Cores	100%
2 Cores OC	~99%
3 Cores	~77%
3 Cores OC	~72%
4 Cores	~60%
4 Cores OC	~58%

Things look damn good if you ask me. The HD6950 tested was bottlenecked while using 2 cores but performance delivered was still amazing in comparison with other ones. In the BETA the Graphics Card was bottlenecked even while using 3 cores @ 4.2 GHZ. Things really improved with the final release of the game.

Even if the tested Intel 2500k Sandy Bridge CPU performed well with two of its cores disabled it doesn’t mean that all dual cores or triple cores processors will do the same. The 2500k processor is still much better than most CPUs on the market when it comes to gaming, it’s even better than the newly released AMD Bulldozer FX 8150 – 8 cores (vs 4) | 8 MB Cache (vs 6) and 3600 MHZ (vs 3300) (See comparison at Anandtech.com) In theory, AMD FX 8150 should crush the sandy bridge CPU, yet it doesn’t.

As you already may know, AMD and Nvidia released special drivers for Battlefield 3. Let’s see if AMD’s 11.10 Preview Drivers improves performance.

Just a couple of frames but this still means a healthy 5% boost. It’s normal that V2 and V3 of the 11.10 perform the same because version 3 of the driver is made entirely for RAGE and nothing else is changed. We expect to see Catalyst 11.10 WHQL released in the next two days 31 OCT 2011, which will pretty much just be WHQL version of the 11.10 V3 preview driver. I’ll definitely include Battlefield 3 in the AMD Catalyst Comparison we do each month.

Finally let’s take a look at the differences in quality between game settings: Low, Medium, High and Ultra. To be honest, Battlefield 3 looks damn right amazing even at Low quality settings, most games these days don’t look as good at highest settings…

Click to Enlarge

Textures look about the same at all quality levels, only thing that is really noticeable is shadow quality. Lighting, texture, animations stay pretty much the same. The differences are in the beholder’s eyes..

If we saw quality differences let’s see differences in performance.

While quality doesn’t change by much, performance really improves by lowering game settings. You can almost double your frame rate by going from Ultra to High without loosing a lot of visual quality. If you’re trying to improve performance try lowering Ambiance Occlusion and Antialiasing Post settings. If you’re running multiple graphics cards in Crossfire and encounter stutter try removing Catalyst 11.9 CAP3 or try CAP4

While some of us won’t be able to enjoy Battlefield 3 at its maximum potential (Ultra Settings @ 1080p) you can still make the best of it at lower settings without worrying too much about losing graphics quality. When it comes to hardware, you’ll need a beast of a GPU to reach 60 FPS, you won’t be able to do so with a single card. That’s nothing to worry about because Battlefield 3 is playable even at low FPS <40.

There’s only one thing left to be said: I got 99 problems but optimization ain’t one.

AMD Catalyst Performance Comparison – Updated 21 March 2012