Radeon HD 7970 CPU scaling performance 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

Battlefield 3 was the one title that I expected to show a lot of performance differences with different CPUs. Dude was I wrong. And I should have known it as BF3 is very efficient with multi-threading, hence it can utilize multiple cores extremely well making its CPU needs really efficient.

I do need to make a note here as especially for BF3 it counts, this is a single player benchmark test. In massive online environment your CPU will become increasingly more important and stressed much worse. However, of we purely focus on the graphics engine versus the processors used, the difference remains rather small.