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 (1920x1200)

• $242 Radeon HD 6870 1GB costs $4.43 per FPS
• $255 GeForce GTX 470 1GB costs $4.12 per FPS
• $324 Radeon HD 5870 1GB costs $5.19 per FPS
• $437 GeForce GTX 480 1536MB costs $6.59 per FPS
• $460 EVGA GTX 460 FTW SLI costs $4.12 per FPS
• $484 Radeon HD 6870 CrossFireX costs $4.52 per FPS
• $520 ASUS ENGTX580 1536MB costs $5.59 per FPS
• $520 ASUS GTX 580 Overclocked costs $5.15 per FPS
• $570 Radeon HD 5970 2GB costs $6.33 per FPS

Test Summary: Our extreme-quality tests use maximum settings for Battlefield: Bad Company 2, still allowing the ASUS GeForce GTX 580 to outperform a dual-GPU ATI Radeon HD 5970 along with every other single-GPU video card on the market. Two AMD Radeon HD 6870's in CrossFire catch the GTX 580 on price and performance, as do the overclocked GTX 460's in SLI, but these both create more heat and consume much more power. Battlefield Bad Company 2 spells bad news for the older GeForce GTX 480, producing the highest cost per frame while being thoroughly outperformed by the ENGTX 580.

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