Game performance - Battlefield Bad Company 2 | 3DM Vantage (DX10)
Battlefield Bad Company 2
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.
A new title in the benchmark test suite, it's 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 processor testing side of things, parallelized processing supporting two to eight parallel threads, which is great if you have a quad core processor.
There is currently a title on the market that is utilizing multi-CPU cores and is heavily threading. Battlefield Bad Company 2 DX11Battlefield Bad Company 2 will happily use four or more cores. The result is that very quickly the CPU does not matter anymore as it maximizing the incredible amount of processor power. As a result the GPU really quickly becomes a bottleneck, even the Radeon HD 5870 is flat out running at 100% whilst the processors have plenty of force left.
That would result very similar performance throughout a large scope of processors.
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:
- DirectX 11 enabled
- 8x Multi-sample Anti aliasing
- 16 Anisotropic filtering
- All image quality settings enabled at maximum
As you can see, the game title is using the processor 100% optimal driving the GPU to its maximum, resulting in little to no difference in your framerates.
3DMark Vantage (DirectX 10)
3DMark Vantage focuses on the two areas most critical to gaming performance: the CPU and the GPU. With the emergence of multi-package and multi-core configurations on both the CPU and GPU side, the performance scale of these areas has widened, and the visual and game-play effects made possible by these configurations are accordingly wide-ranging. This makes covering the entire spectrum of 3D gaming a difficult task. 3DMark Vantage solves this problem in three ways:
1. Isolate GPU and CPU performance benchmarking into separate tests,
2. Cover several visual and game-play effects and techniques in four different tests, and
3. Introduce visual quality presets to scale the graphics test load up through the highest-end hardware.
To this end, 3DMark Vantage has two GPU tests, each with a different emphasis on various visual techniques, and two CPU tests, which cover the two most common CPU-side tasks: Physics Simulation and AI. It also has four visual quality presets (Entry, Performance, High, and Extreme) available in the Advanced and Professional versions, which increase the graphics load successively for even more visual quality. Each preset will produce a separate, official 3DMark Score, tagged with the preset in question.
Above you can see 3DMark Vantage, this time the overall P score. The CPU / 1090T scores roughly 16.500 points and overclocked we close in at the 980X running in its baseline configuration at 18.000 points. Overall very decent results.
