DX11: Battlefield Bad Company 2

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. Unfortunately, the Extreme Edition Intel Core i7-980X six-core CPU with twelve threads will not see full utilization.

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. The Frostbite-1.5 game engine in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 appears to equalize our test set of video cards, and despite AMD's sponsorship of the game it still plays well using any brand of graphics card.

• BattleField: Bad Company 2
  • Extreme Settings: (Highest Quality, HBAO, 8x AA, 16x AF, 180s Fraps Single-Player Intro Scene)

Battlefield Bad Company 2 Extreme Quality Settings

Cost Analysis: Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (1680x1050)

• $142 Radeon HD 5770 1GB costs $3.59 per FPS
• $167 GeForce GTX 460 768MB costs $3.46 per FPS
• $180 Radeon HD 6850 1GB costs $3.21 per FPS
• $188 Radeon HD 5830 1GB costs $4.08 per FPS
• $220 GeForce GTX 460 1GB costs $4.04 per FPS
• $240 Radeon HD 6870 1GB costs $3.72 per FPS
• $260 EVGA GTX 460 FTW 1GB costs $3.47 per FPS
• $262 Radeon HD 5850 1GB costs $4.23 per FPS
• $292 GeForce GTX 470 1GB costs $3.93 per FPS

Test Summary: Our extreme-quality tests use maximum settings for Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and so users who dial down the anti-aliasing or use a lower resolution will have much better frame rate performance. All of these video cards produced playable frame rates up to 1920x1200, where the Radeon HD 6850 really began to pull ahead of both 768MB and 1GB GeForce GTX 460 video cards and completely surpassed anything the Radeon HD 5830 or 5770 could produce. The similarly priced EVGA GeForce GTX 460 FTW outperforms the Radeon HD 6870 in both frame rate and value (also matches GTX 470), but then the 6870 clears past the Radeon HD 5850 without much trouble.

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