GeForce GTX 480 3-way SLI review - VGA performance: Battlefield Bad Company 2 (DX11)

Battlefield Bad Company 2 DX11

The Battlefield series has been running for quite a while. The last big entry in the series, Bad Company, was a console exclusive, much to the disappointment of PC gamers everywhere. DICE broke the exclusivity with the sequel, thankfully, and now PC owners are treated to the best Battlefield since Battlefield 2.

The plot follows the four soldiers of Bad Company as they track down a "new" super weapon in development by Russian forces. You might not immediately get that this game is about Bad Company, as the intro mission starts off with a World War II raid, but it all links together in the end.

Battlefield Bad Company 2 then, we opt to test DX11 solely for this title as we want to look at the most modern performance and image quality. DX11 wise we get as extra softened dynamic shadows and shader based performance improvements. A great game to play, a great game image quality wise. We raise the bar, image quality settings wise:

• DirectX 11 enabled
• 8x Multi-sample Anti aliasing
• 16 Anisotropic filtering
• All image quality settings enabled at maximum

So here you'll notice nearly perfect 2-way SLI scaling. When you look at 2560x1600 that's perfect scaling for 3-way as well. However, and remember this, the minute you'll notice a graph in the charts go level, we are running into a CPU bottleneck.

A CPU bottleneck is a situation where the GPUs can deal with much more, yet the processor is not fast enough to feed data to the graphics driver and thus graphics card.  At 1600x1200 up-to 1920x1200 we can see that happen clearly. But things will get much more worse in other benchmarks.

Anyway, the scaling certainly is there, but a Core i7 965X at 3750 MHz can not cope with the 9 billion transistors monster setup, which is 3-way SLI.