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 should improve performance for users with an multi-core CPUs like the Intel Core-i7 processor and the AMD 1090T used in this test. 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.

These test results are more interesting. Note that overclocking the ASUS Crosshair III Formula motherboard resulted in no performance improvement at all, but overclocking the 890FX-based Crosshair IV Formula motherboard resulted in an 8% improvement. Also, as we saw in the Unigine Heaven 2.0 benchmark, the 790FX-based Crosshair III motherboard turned in better performance at its stock clock speeds than the newer motherboard...almost 7% better, in fact. The real question is why the results for the stock-clocked Crosshair IV are as low as they are, and I can't come up with a theory why they should be. Sometimes, all you can do is run the benchmark and report the results.

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