DX11: Battlefield 3
DX11: Battlefield 3
One of the biggest game releases of 2011 was Battlefield 3, a combat immersive game that blew our socks off. We'll take this title and have a look at DX11 performance with the newest graphics cards.
With the plot set in 2014, Sgt 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
- 4x MSAA enabled
- 16x AF enabled
- HBAO enabled
- Level: Operation Swordbreaker
BF3 is probably one of the best titles scaling wise. Again very similar behavior, up-to 2-way SLI you are golden with superb scaling at 1920x1200, 3-way starts to matter AFTER 1920x1200.
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, 4x MSAA will cost you almost a third to half your framerate. The chart above shows various cards at 1920x1200.
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 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.
Kickass multi-GPU scaling for 2-way SLI, but 3-way SLI... well you need to be above 1920x1200 really. A triple monitor setup would make a difference.
Mind you that I do not have any 7950 CFX 3x results available as with three GPUs the AMD setup kept crashing the game when we tested it a while ago. Again, 2-way SLI shows muscle here. For 3-way SLI you need to be way higher in resolution.