Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Benchmark Results

The Battlefield franchise has been known to demand a lot from PC graphics hardware. DICE (Digital Illusions CE) has incorporated their Frostbite-1.5 game engine with Destruction-2.0 feature set with Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 features destructible environments using Frostbit Destruction-2.0, and adds gravitational bullet drop effects for projectiles shot from weapons at a long distance. The Frostbite-1.5 game engine used on Battlefield: Bad Company 2 consists of DirectX-10 primary graphics, with improved performance and softened dynamic shadows added for DirectX-11 users.

At the time Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was published, DICE was also working on the Frostbite-2.0 game engine. This upcoming engine will include native support for DirectX-10.1 and DirectX-11, as well as parallelized processing support for 2-8 parallel threads. This will improve performance for users with an Intel Core-i7 processor.

In our benchmark tests of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, the first three minutes of action in the single-player raft night scene are captured with FRAPS. Relative to the online multiplayer action, these frame rate results are nearly identical to daytime maps with the same video settings.

BF:BC2 shows that DirectX10 need not be the death card for NVIDIA GeForce products; the Frostbite-1.5 game engine is partial to NVIDIA products over ATI, despite AMD's sponsorship of the game. In Battlefield: Bad Company 2, a substantially overclocked GeForce GTX275 matches right up with the ATI Radeon HD5830 running standard clocks. The mildly overclocked GeForce GTX285 improves on that performance by 8%, but the stock HD 5870 beats that by about 20 FPS, almost a 50% gain. Of course, cranking the EAH5870 up to 1 GHz puts the crowning touch on it, with an average frame rate of 68 FPS. BF:BC2 is definitely playable, with all the settings maxed out, at that level of performance.

I know general purpose computing uses a very small fraction of the power contained in today's average PC, but it does seem that gaming applications are at least trying to push the envelope. Playing this game with the previous generation of graphics cards is a complete waste of time and effort. Some of that is attributable to advances in 3D Graphics APIs (application programming interfaces) like DirectX11, but at some level the game developers have to make decisions about how much detail to include in the scenes, and how realistically to render soft surfaces like skin and water. I know some of the improvements may look minimal or insignificant when perusing the promotional screenshots, but they all add up, in the final result. Bring it on, I say. I'll find some other use for that old HD 4850 graphics card.

In our next section, Benchmark Reviews tests with Devil May Cry 4 Benchmark. Read on to see how a blended high-demand GPU test with low video frame buffer demand will impact our test products.

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