Despite being riddled with major bugs, glitches and crashes across all platforms when it was released in late 2013, Battlefield 4 remains among the best looking games available on PC and it seems to be as popular as ever.
Over a month after its launch, EA said that fixing Battlefield 4 was a top priority and DICE quickly began patching the game while halting work on future products including Mirror's Edge, Star Wars: Battlefront and BF4 DLCs.
Over a year and five DLC packs later, EA is ready to take a step forward in the franchise with Battlefield Hardline, the first Battlefield title worked on by Dead Space developer Visceral Games.
Battlefield Hardline is scheduled to arrive on March 17 but starting this week you can get your frag on for free during EA's open beta phase, which should hopefully help avoid many of the launch issues that plagued Battlefield 4 at release.
While the Battlefield Hardline beta will be available to gamers on all platforms (PC, Xbox One, PS4, Xbox 360 and PS3) folks playing on PC can use this benchmark preview to determine what kind of performance your graphics card will deliver.
As always, PC gamers stand to get the most out of this release as the Xbox One is limited to 60fps at 720p, while the PS4 will run at 60fps at 900p. Initially, consoles were said to be running Hardline at 1080p, but performance obviously fell short at this resolution.
Testing Methodology
We used the latest AMD and Nvidia drivers on a dozen DirectX 11 graphics card configurations covering most price ranges. Our test rig was outfitted with the Intel Core i7-5960X to remove CPU bottlenecks that could influence high-end GPU scores.
We used Fraps to record 60 seconds of gameplay for benchmarking but it will be a little tricky to test Battlefield Hardline because it's an online multiplayer game. In the past we have avoided such tests as generating accurate results is difficult because reproducing the same test repeatedly is a challenge. It's particularly difficult in games that have random respawn points such as Battlefield 4. (To enable Fraps, you have to hit the ~ key and type the following into the console: RenderDevice.PresentAsync 0.)
Hardline is a little easier as you can select a deploy point on the map so we benchmarked using the 'Bank Job' map as a member of the Police force and deployed in the same location. Moreover, we joined the same server which always had very few players who didn't interfere with our testing – this seemed preferable to joining completely empty servers.
We tested using 1366x768, 1920x1080 and 2560x1600 resolutions using the 'Ultra' quality preset which sets anti-aliasing to 4xMSAA and uses HBAO ambient occlusion.
Test System Specs
- Intel Core i7-5960X(3.00GHz)
- x4 4GB Kingston Predator DDR4-2400 (CAS 12-13-13-24)
- Asrock X99 Extreme6 (Intel X99)
- Silverstone Strider Series (700w)
- Samsung SSD 850 Pro 512GB (SATA 6Gb/s)
- Gigabyte Radeon R9 290X (4096MB)
- Gigabyte Radeon R9 290 (4096MB)
- Gigabyte Radeon R9 285 (2048MB)
- Gigabyte Radeon R9 280X (3072MB)
- HIS Radeon R7 265 (2048MB)
- Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 (4096MB)
- Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 (4096MB)
- Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 (2048MB)
- Gigabyte GeForce GTX 780 (3072MB)
- Gigabyte GeForce GTX 770 (2048MB)
- Palit GeForce GTX 760 (2048MB)
- Gigabyte GeForce GTX 750 Ti (2048MB)
- Microsoft Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit
- Nvidia GeForce 347.25 WHQL
- AMD Catalyst 14.12 Omega