Introduction and Test Bed Setup

Besides Quake 4 and Call of Duty 2, Battlefield 2 has been one of the most anticipated shooters set for release this year. Battlefield 2 builds largely on the formula that made its predecessors, Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield Vietnam so great, with the addition of new classes and a new experience system with stat tracking. The game essentially merges all the action found in the original Battlefield games with real-life modern weaponry ranging from pistols, rifles, and sub-machine guns, all the way up to the latest helicopters and fighter jets.

Battlefield 2 features a brand new graphics engine that’s designed to take advantage of the latest DirectX 9 graphics cards, while the game’s large 64-player maps can push your PC’s memory subsystem like never before. With this in mind, we’ve put together an optimization guide for Battlefield 2, summarizing all the game’s settings, as well as their impact on performance.

Testbed setup and explanation

The range of cards used in the guide is completely different this time around. Battlefield 2 is a very graphically intensive game requiring a fairly powerful CPU, a good amount of memory, and a strong graphics subsystem. We are incorporating more powerful cards into this lineup, while still using the mainstream and the budget cards. We are also going to use PCI Express and AGP-based graphics cards. For the motherboard and CPU, we have updated the parts to be faster than in previous optimization guides. We selected the 3800+ with the MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum and the ASUS A8V nForce4 Ultra motherboards. We also upgraded our RAM configuration to 1GB of Corsair Dual Channel DDR memory. All of these factors we utilized to minimize the bottleneck coming from the rest of the system so that we can focus on GPU performance.

System Setup

AMD Athlon 64 3800+
MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum Motherboard (for PCIe cards)
ASUS A8V (for AGP cards)
1GB Corsair XMS TWINX DDR400 Dual Channel DDR Memory
80GB Western Digital SE Hard Drive
Windows XP Professional SP2
DirectX 9.0c
Battlefield 2 v1.1.2484.0
Fraps 2.6.4

Video Cards used for Testing

ATI Cards, using Catalyst Version 5.8 (non-CCC)
Sapphire Radeon X850XT PE PCI-E
Sapphire Radeon X700 Pro 256MB PCI-E
Gigabyte GV-R80P256D (Radeon X800 Pro, AGP)
ATI Radeon 9800 XT AGP
MSI Radeon RX600XT-TD128E PCI-E
ATI Radeon 8500 AGP

NVIDIA cards, using Forceware Version 77.77
NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT PCI-E
e-GeForce 6600GT AGP
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra (GDDR3) Reference Board