Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Test 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.

The GTX 560Ti really stands above the crowd in this benchmark, unless you would rather say that the HD 6870 is doing poorly. Either way, the MSI N560GTX-Ti performs 30% better than the R6870 graphics card. That's not a modest difference, that's a game-winning difference. To be fair, it smokes the GTX 460 siblings as well. This is one title where the 768MB version of the GTX 460 does OK; some other tests push it over the edge with memory usage. In actual game play it's not always such a problem, but synthetic benchmarks like Heaven really punish it.

The little-documented feature in the basic game setup, which allows the application to choose which DirectX API it uses during the session, is not a factor here. All of the tested cards here are DX11-capable, and the game was running in DX11 mode for all the test results reported here. Even though this is primarily developed as a DX10 game, there are DX11 features incorporated in BF:BC2, like softened shadows. That one visual enhancement takes a small, but measureable toll on frame rates. It doesn't have as big an impact as aggressive use of tessellation would, either from the visuals standpoint or the computing perspective.

In the next section we use one of my favorite games, DiRT-2, to look at DX11 performance. Life isn't ALL about shooting aliens; sometimes you just need to get out of the city and drive...!

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