Battlefield 3 Beta Performance Preview

Edit: Battlefield 3 Final Version Benchmark

Anywhere you look, it’s all about Battlefield 3 and how it manages to revolutionize the whole first person shooter industry. Personally I haven’t been impressed by anything I saw till this day, mainly because I’m used to see game publishers and developers glorify games only to disappoint later. But now with Battlefield 3 Beta available we can all settle our minds before buying.

Graphics

Maybe the biggest advantage BF3 has is the Frostbite 2 Engine which delivers some outstanding graphic quality and detail. Everything around you seems alive, everything is destroyable, everything is breathtaking. Battlefield 3 features DirectX 10/11 API but no DirectX 9 ( Windows XP is not supported by this game ). Another big plus about BF3 is sound, sound is freaking amazing, it really throws you into the battle. Flying bullets sound extraordinary, explosions seem to happen right outside your house. DICE really put a lot of effort into making this game sound the way it should.

Performance

A big problem is raised by the level of detail: performance. Well, performance is a really big concern with Battlefield 3 and I could go on and on about it but the game is in Beta and DICE has still one month of optimizing to do.

I can only give you a hint at the time, if you have a AMD graphics card you might wanna take a look at AMD Catalyst 11.10 Preview Driver which was specially released by AMD to bring extra performance with Battlefield 3.

As @CatalystCreator says: “Both 11.9 and 11.10 will work with BF3, but 11.10 includes a couple extra optimizations (AA, and better CF scaling)”, I performed a simple test to see if the improvement is really there:

Test System Specifications

Game Settings:

So AMD Catalyst 11.10 Preview improves performance with Battlefield 3 by 8% over AMD Catalyst 11.9. A 3 frames improvement doesn’t seem much but users with crossfire will definitely feel a real boost in performance.

If you have an Nvidia graphics card you may wanna install 285.38 Beta Drivers that were specially built for Battlefield 3: 285.38 for Windows 7 x32 or 285.38 for Windows 7 x64

Finally, lets see what kind of CPU is needed for Battlefield 3 to run smoothly (OC = 4.2 GHZ):

	Battlefield 3 Beta | DirectX 11 | CPU Usage
1 Core	100%
2 Cores	100%
3 Cores	100%
4 Cores	~72%
4 Cores OC	~69%

At this point things don’t look really bright. To max out Battlefield 3 and still get decent performance you certainly need a monster of a computer. If you don’t have a very good CPU, overclocking is always an option. The same goes for the graphics card but an upgrade is ideal. The HD6950 performed OK since I tested in a very intense part of the game. If I set AntiAliasing Post to medium performance increased significantly, I could get a steady 50-60 FPS without losing much quality.
I must add that Battlefield felt smooth even at 30-40 FPS and was playable, with only 3 cores the game started stuttering a bit and became annoying.

Even when recording gameplay the test system still managed to deliver “playability”:

Until the final release you still have time to upgrade your PC and play Battlefield 3 at full detail because that’s the way it’s meant to be played.

EDIT: Acording to “Global Battlefield Community Manager at DICE” the beta build is well behind the retail build and most of the bugs are already fixed (source). So what is the real point of this open beta if not to fix issues? Why not update it to the latest build and work from there?