MSI Big Bang P67 Marshal review - Game performance - Battlefield Bad Company 2

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 02/02/2011 03:00 PM [ ] 0 comment(s)

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 the processor testing side of things, parallelized processing supporting two to eight parallel threads, which is great if you have a quad core (or hexacore) processor.

This is currently a title on the market that utilizes multi-CPU cores and is heavily multi-threaded. Battlefield Bad Company 2 will happily use four or more cores. The result is that very quickly the CPU does not matter anymore as it's maximizing the incredible amount of processor power. As a result the GPU really quickly becomes a bottleneck, even the GeForce GTX 580 is flat out running at 100% whilst the processor has plenty of force left. That would result in very similar performance throughout a large scope of processors.

We opt to test in DX11 / 8xAA for this title as we want to look at the most modern performance and image quality, eg. how you actually play the game at home. DX11 wise we get as extras softened dynamic shadows and shader based performance improvements. A great game to play and a great game image quality wise. We raise the bar, image quality settings wise:

DirectX 11 enabled
8x Multisample Anti-aliasing
16x Anisotropic Filtering
All image quality settings enabled at maximum

Now do not fall under the illusion that the CPU does not matter for gaming. No, it's just that the GPU matters way more. We show these tests based on a real-world scenario and on a current PC gaming system. Were you to, for example, use a multi-GPU fragfest monster of a PC, then the AMD processors will all show lower performance, as core for core the Intel Core i5/i7 series offers more bang, yet not for buck. You can see that really well at 1024x768.

As stated, for real-world gaming experiences with hefty image quality settings like this test the GPU just matters more, BF2 is GPU limited, so even the overclock makes almost no difference.

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