GeForce GTX 670 2 and 3-way SLI review - 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.