MSI GeForce GTX 480 Lightning review - VGA performance: Battlefield Bad Company 2 (DX11)

Battlefield Bad Company 2 DX11

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.

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. 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 processor. 

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:

• Level Upriver
• DirectX 11 enabled
• 8x Multi-sample Anti-aliasing
• 16 Anisotropic filtering
• All image quality settings enabled at maximum

The game is still a somewhat newer title and as such we can offer merely a dozen or so results in this performance chart, above however we see performance scaling of this game with a variety of DX11 cards at 8xAA and 16xAF. Only multi-GPU combinations are are able to beat this single GPU graphics card.