Final Thoughts
We've held off on testing Mantle for two reasons. First and foremost, Mantle is sketchy in Hardline right now and we often saw performance decrease.
The second problem is Origin. We had to cut some testing as EA's platform only allows us to change the CPU/GPU up to eight times per account before locking us out. We were forced use four different accounts to produce this article!
After eight hardware changes we get hit with "we're sorry, an error has occurred...too many computers have accessed this account's version of Battlefield Hardline recently. Please try again later." Ohh how I long for a Steam version of Hardline.
As you might imagine these pointless anti-piracy measures made testing slow and somewhat painful. Hopefully these accounts will allow hardware changes again soon so we can do more testing.
Those hoping to play the retail version of Battlefield Hardline at 1080p with everything cranked up will want at least a Radeon R9 270X or GeForce GTX 760 for what we consider to be the bare minimum of 40-45fps on average.
For around 50fps the R9 285 or GTX 960 will get the job done, while the R9 280X or GTX 770 will deliver a more pleasing 55fps. Getting over 60fps required the GTX 780 or faster and it's interesting to note that the R9 290 smoked the GTX 780 with an average of 73fps versus 65fps.
Gaming at multi-monitor resolutions or high single monitor resolutions such as 2560x1600 will require a seriously powerful GPU. The R9 290 and R9 290X averaged just 46fps and 50fps while the GTX 980 managed 53fps. The GTX Titan X proved its mettle here delivering 70fps.
Folks playing at higher resolutions such as 4K will want to reduce the anti-aliasing level to 2xMSAA or just disable it altogether.
When it comes to CPU performance, gamers will want a decent quad-core and it doesn't really matter if it comes from AMD or Intel. The AMD FX series was only slightly behind the performance of Intel's Core i5 and Core i7 processors. Based on our testing it doesn't seem like Hardline is particularly CPU-intensive, but of course this could change with 32 active players.
As we found when testing the beta version, Hardline isn't any more demanding than 2013's Battlefield 4, so most fans won't have a reason to upgrade components.
Until the next one, you can check out more PC gaming benchmark tests here, including GTA V, Far Cry 4, Homeworld Remastered, Dying Light and more.