AMD Radeon HD 7850 and 7870 review

DX11: Battlefield 3

One of the biggest game releases of 2011 is Battlefield 3, a combat immersive game that is about to blow you from your socks. We'll take this title and have a look at DX11 performance with the newest graphics cards.

With the plot set in 2014, SSgt Blackburn leads a five-man squad on a mission to locate, find and safely return a US squad investigating a possible chemical weapons site, whose last known position was a market controlled by a hostile militia called the PLR. Blackburn and his squad is later sent to Tehran to apprehend a high-value target named Al-Bashir. While investigating an underground vault in a local bank, Blackburn and his team learn that the PLR had access to Russian portable nuclear devices, and that two of the devices are missing.

All test runs have enabled:

• DX11
• Ultra mode
• 4xMSAAAA enabled
• 16x AF enabled
• HBAO enabled
• Level: Operation Swordbreaker

We test at Ultra quality mode, should your graphics card have severe issues running in this configuration, by all means select a lower quality level or disable MSAA, 4xA MSAA will cost you almost a third to half your framerate. The chart above shows various cards in 1920x1200.

We use a run that is located in the Operation Swordbreaker level, have a peek where we are recording:

Above, the level we use to measure game performance. This is the Operation Swordbreaker level - a generic recording, not specific to this graphics card.

Our Battlefield 3 DirectX 11 benchmark run, here we are in DX11 mode with Ultra settings. This is the Operation Swordbreaker level where there is a good balance between GPU load and processor utilization, making this an excellent level to test GPU performance in. There will be levels that are a tiny bit more stringent, there will be levels and sections way more easy. We think this level is the best representation of the game engine though.