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In terms of visual quality and gameplay Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is highly impressive and in my opinion provides Crysis-like graphics on a Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 type feel.
Any game that looks this good is going to be demanding. What we experienced is that tuning down visual settings along with the resolution still hurt budget and even some mid-range graphics cards. DICE recommends at least a GeForce GTX 260 or Radeon HD 4780 graphics card to play Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and it is rare to find this kind of high performance GPUs falling under the recommended specifications. Read on for our in-depth findings on GPU performance and CPU scaling.
Read the complete article.
User Comments: 124
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StaffSteve said:
Also none of the results show a minimum or average, just the top FPS I assume? This has amateur written all over it.Put your glasses on chap and read page 2 amateurs...
I wish you would have actually tested some dual core processors rather than just disabling cores. I don't see how you can say that CPU is taken out of the equation when I've talked to many people that are running Geforce 8800GTS cards and while dual core users are just barely playable, quad core users are reporting decent performance.I have played using a Phenom II X2 555 and Pentium G6950, both run perfect with a GeForce GTX 285 and Radeon HD 5850 just as the Core i7 did with two cores. We are not talking about Athlon X2 processors here.
Good article but really applicable for single player only. MP is very very much more demanding of CPU with all the physics calculations. Dual core Athlons especially have a terrible time of it, no matter what video card.If you can tell me how to record a multiplayer timedemo I would greatly appreciate it as I have not been able to work it out...
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Hello everybody, I can confirm that a quad core processor does make a huge difference.
Settings:
1680 X 1050
Everything on max
1X AA 4X AF
HBAO Off
VSync Off
System before:
Intel E8400.
HD4870 512MB
4GB Ram
Win 7 64 bit
FRAPS Fps -> 40-50
System upgraded with Q9550 (everything else the same)
FRAPS Fps -> 70-80
If you check the CPU core loads you can see that one core has +- 100% load and all the other cores +- 50%
This has been tested in single player.
So the test that has been done here with the disabled cores seems false or incorrect.
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StaffSteve said:
Interesting story but a few things don't quite add up. For example with a Core i7 920 processor we saw just 40-50fps with a Radeon HD 4870 (1GB). Yet with this relatively slow graphics card you saw a 60% performance increase when going from a 3GHz dual-core to a 2.8GHz quad-core.
That said we set out to test graphics card performance and only touched on CPU performance at the request of a few readers. Perhaps in the future we can look at CPU performance with more depth.
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[-Steve-] said:
Interesting story but a few things don't quite add up. For example with a Core i7 920 processor we saw just 40-50fps with a Radeon HD 4870 (1GB). Yet with this relatively slow graphics card you saw a 60% performance increase when going from a 3GHz dual-core to a 2.8GHz quad-core.
Hi, I made an account to reply to you
I have posted the above. First of all do not hurt the feelings of my graphics card, calling her slow
I see that in your tests you always used AA X2 , could that be the difference ? I lost al lot of FPS when using AA X2. Also the HBAO and VSYNC had impact as well. I tested in a different level it was in the desert town so less stuff to draw ... I will try to test again with the same settings as you and post the results here (did you use HBAO and VSYNC ?) (maybe on friday)
But all that does not change much to the fact that indeed I saw 60% perf increase with a quad core. And I am not telling stories here or something, I am not an intel employee wanting you all to upgrade the CPU
I just posted it because I thought that the information found here was incorrect. -
And I forgot to mention that your performance review was an interesting read that I enjoyed much !
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StaffSteve said:
Hey Beretta1979 thanks for signing up and the feeback you have provided. We did test with 2xAA and you are right that does have a negative impact on performance. Vsync was certainly disabled, as was HBAO.
Look it is quite possible that you did see such a huge performance increase. I admitted in one of my first posts that we have not done enough processor testing and in the article I was basing my opinions on what I had seen so far. In all honesty I have only tested heavily overclocked dual-core processors and it is very likely that at frequencies below 3GHz quad-core processors will provide tangible performance gains.
The aim of the article, at least my aim was to test a range of GPU's in the best possible conditions (Core i7) to show the readers what kind of GPU they will need to play Battlefield: Bad Company 2. After all if a graphics card is not able to provide playable performance with a Core i7 processor nothing is going to change with slower quad-core and dual-core processors.
Certainly it would be great to do some real comparisons with Core 2 Duo/Quad and Phenom II X2/X4 processors but that's a lot of testing and would warrant its own article. I am holding out at this stage until I can find an accurate means to test the multiplayer aspect of this game.
Ohh and I didn't mean to pick on the Radeon HD 4870. I just meant that by today's standards its just a mid-range graphics card...
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[-Steve-] said:
Ohh and I didn't mean to pick on the Radeon HD 4870. I just meant that by today's standards its just a mid-range graphics card...
I was just joking
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Some of you guys need to chill the eff out. These guys do us a favor and give us basic info and you scream bloody murder if it doesn't jive in your malfunctioning brain. Great article guys, really appreciate it. I have a 9800GTX which I think I will indeed have to overclock to run this badboy which pisses me off since I run MW2 no problem maxed with no OC on the processor or gcard. My X6800 should do alright. Put her up to 3.5 and hope it doesnt catch on fire.
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I loved the first Bad Company as I found the humour and the perspective to be most refreashing. I like games that don't take themselves too seriously. Now, BC2 looks to be even more fun with more clever dialogue and uber destructible environments so I will be picking it up shortly for my 360.
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I want to play this game so bad, just don't have the time right now to play. MW2 is still take my time.
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Found this article on HBAO with Nvidia cards. [link]
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The beta ran fine for me at 1920 x 1080 @ high settings, no AA/AF on a Powercolor Radeon HD 4770. Very well programmed engine. There is a spelling error here "DICE recommends at least a GeForce GTX 260 or Radeon HD ---->4780<---- graphics card to play Battlefield: Bad Company 2"
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It would have been nice to add some 5770 crossfire results. Wouldn't more people have this setup rather than the much more expensive 5870 crossfire?
I have the game and play it absolutely maxed (i think its 8xAA and 16xAF, don't quote me) at 1920x1200 with a i7 920 and crossfire 5770's but haven't checked the frame rates yet. Very playable in single player but laggy in multi player.
I would like to see some results from some experts showing how well these cards and CPU scale with this game.
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To be honest, I can't see any difference between HBAO set to "On" or "Off" (in DX10) visually. The only thing that is noticeable is the performance loss.
I wouldn't mind seeing some tests at 2560x1600 and 1920x1080 with all "High" settings and HBAO set to "Off".
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To be honest, I can't see any difference between HBAO set to "On" or "Off" (in DX10) visually. The only thing that is noticeable is the performance loss.
I wouldn't mind seeing some tests at 2560x1600 and 1920x1080 with all "High" settings and HBAO set to "Off".
That was my post above. I had not noticed some tests were run. My apoloigies.
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You will see a big difference with a Q9550.
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StaffSteve said:You will see a big difference with a Q9550.
Yes I have been doing some quad-core vs. dual-core testing and quad-core does make a big difference, particularly when playing at lower resolutions with clock speeds below 3.0GHz.
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Apologies, the previous post should have included the following quote above it (which didn't work as intended here) :
Are you sure you have got the graphs correct? The Radeon 4830 for example delivers 32.3 fps on the high setting at 1680x1050 and then apparantly goes down in performance to 28.5 fps on the medium setting. Any explanation for this or why this discrepancy wasn't mentioned in the article?
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StaffSteve said:Apologies, the previous post should have included the following quote above it (which didn't work as intended here) :
Are you sure you have got the graphs correct? The Radeon 4830 for example delivers 32.3 fps on the high setting at 1680x1050 and then apparantly goes down in performance to 28.5 fps on the medium setting. Any explanation for this or why this discrepancy wasn't mentioned in the article?
From what we have seen there is really no difference in performance between the high and medium quality settings. With FRAPS and the method used for testing we would say there is an error margin of 2-3fps so this is roughly within that margin. Also the drivers are not mature enough yet and we tested before a patch was released. That said even with the latest patch there is still no real performance difference between the medium and high quality settings.
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Thank you for the reply and update. The HD 4830 does seem to be a strange little card in regards to performance, especially when compared to the HD 4770. It seems to get regularly beaten by its newer brethren unless really taxed on memory access/bandwidth, but then only wins at resolutions with performance that isn't good enough for gaming. I'll hold out a smallish hope that ATI can make a difference with a newer driver set.
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I laugh at the "Conclusion: Demanding, But Not Another Crysis"
I find Arma II far more demanding than Crysis.
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My computer is managing to struggle along with a pretty pitiable FPS in this game on low settings.
Really gotta upgrade this thing, anyway, the game is simply INCREDIBLE and it's destroying my life completely, see you on the battlefield!
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Dual Core is OK.
Playing BC2 on dual core 2,5Ghz and 9500GT
graphs 1440x900 really smooth gameplay.
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Apologies, the previous post should have included the following quote above it (which didn't work as intended here) :
Are you sure you have got the graphs correct? The Radeon 4830 for example delivers 32.3 fps on the high setting at 1680x1050 and then apparantly goes down in performance to 28.5 fps on the medium setting. Any explanation for this or why this discrepancy wasn't mentioned in the article?
28fps is really ok.... human eyes canīt differences more than 20fps so, 28 is ok or PAL-N system is slow?
byebye good revierw
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Well I have an Intel C2D 8400 @ 4GHz and a BFG Geforce 275 GTX OC and while my CPU usage is usually at 90% or so, my GPU usage is usually around 40-45%.
How exactly is that "getting the most out of my graphics card"?
I'm quite tempted to buy a q9550 CPU as that is basically the best I can get without upgrading motherboard/RAM as well. I would think that since my CPU is being used near 100% and my GPU isn't even used half way, that upgrading to a quad core would benefit me, however this review goes against that logic...
I would like to see actual Dual Core processors tested with midrange cards to see how big of a difference it really makes. An i7 even running on 2 cores has benefits over a Core2Duo so I have a hard time going by those results.
Basically, a followup review focusing on CPUs would be great for all of us with decent video cards wondering if we should grab a quad core.
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