With just three days before the Battlefield 3 multiplayer beta comes to an end, DICE community manager Ian Tornay has announced that they're opening up the 64-player, vehicle-filled Caspian Border map over the weekend to do some load testing. Previously, the map was available only as part of a private beta on password protected servers.
Also see: Battlefield 3 Beta GPU & CPU Performance Test
The test will be for PC gamers only as DICE is specifically testing 64-player server configurations – console versions of Battlefield 3 will support only 24 simultaneous players. The developer also dropped a reminder that Battlefield 3 is still in beta, and as such users may experience crashes, network instability and outages. DICE will take the opportunity to fine tune its servers and says that your experience with the beta is not necessarily indicative of the final product.
In related news, AMD has rolled out a second Catalyst 11.10 preview driver just in time for the weekend. The latest release improves Battlefield 3 performance for Radeon HD 6000 and HD 5000 series cards in standard and CrossFire configurations with or without anti-Aliasing enabled. It also improves performance in Rage and fixes a few errors in the game, including a flickering issue and intermittent crashing when loading levels.
The Catalyst 11.10 v2 driver is available here for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. The full Battlefield 3 game is scheduled for an October 25 launch in the U.S. and October 28 across Europe.