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.

Cost Analysis: Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (1920x1080)

• $115 GeForce GTS 250 512MB (9800GTX+) = $3.71 per FPS
• $140 GeForce GTS 450 1GB (MSI Cyclone) = $3.41 per FPS
• $145 Radeon HD 5770 1GB (PowerColor 1GBD5-PPVG2) = $3.74 per FPS
• $260 GeForce GTX 285 1GB = $5.07 per FPS

Test Summary: Even with these high settings, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is playable with all the video cards in our test bed. Before the Fermi series was released, the GTS250 was one of the most comparable cards to the Radeon HD 5770. Here you can see that the improvement over the standing competition at the time is quite significant. The release of the GTS450 has changed things a little, and a slightly less expensive card is now outperforming, even if only by a few FPS, the PowerColor AX5770 PCS+ in the Battlefield benchmark test. It appears as though this test agrees with the Calico test.

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