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.

Recently added to the benchmark test suite is 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 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 extra 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

A somewhat new title, and as such less results for the performance chart, above however is the game with a variety of DX11 cards at 8xAA and 16xAF, not exactly a tough nut to crack for a card of this caliber. The ASUS ARES shows it's pure muscle alright. Performance is real close to the R5870 setup in crossfire, which make total sense as both cards are equal in clock frequencies ...though the ARES has more framebuffer to play around in. But as often becomes clear, the difference in-between 1 GB or 2 GB per GPU is really hard to measure unless you play your games at 2560x1600 or apply ridiculous amounts of AA. And even then it remains relative.