PowerColor Radeon HD 7950 PCS+ review

DX11: Battlefield 3

One of the biggest game releases of 2011 was Battlefield 3, an immersive combat game that can 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 the following 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 sever 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 level, here we are in DX11 mode with Ultra settings. This is the Operation Swordbreaker level where there is a good balance in-between graphics card 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.