GeForce GTX 580 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 - Next to being a great game for gameplay, it's also an awesome title to test both graphics cards and processors with. The game has native support for DirectX 11 and on the processor testing side of things, parallelized processing supporting two to eight parallel threads, which is great if you have a quad core processor. 

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 extras, 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:

• Level: Upriver
• DirectX 11 enabled
• 8x Multi-sample Anti-aliasing
• 16 Anisotropic Filtering
• All image quality settings enabled at maximum

The title is very GPU limited and that's good news for multi-GPU setups. Spot on, that is very nice scaling throughout the selection of monitor resolutions. VERY impressive.

The performance chart above shows a variety of DX11 cards and multi-GPU configurations at 8xAA and 16xAF. We see the GTX 580 3-way SLI on top as expected.