Main Menu, Terrain, and Effects

Main Menu

The Main Menu is easily navigable and gets right to the point. It allows you to choose Single Player, Multiplayer, or configure other options in terms of gameplay, video, and audio settings. Remember to set your video options beforehand, since you cannot change them during gameplay. Battlefield 2 requires you to exit your current game (or disconnect if playing online), apply video settings, and then restart. Restarting the game after changing video settings also requires that your shaders be re-optimized for certain tweaks, so expect longer loading times than most games. Other than that, the game and its Main Menu are laid out well, giving you all the functionality you need to get ready for battle. Check out the screens below.

The Main Menu, gets right to the point

The video graphics options screen

Ahh, optimizing shaders again eh?

Settings in Depth

Terrain

This option sets the level of detail used for terrain. For example, the higher this is set, the crisper blades of grass will look, while rocks and other objects on the ground will be drawn with more distinctness. This is a major setting in the game, improving the overall gameplay experience a lot.

Look at the grass, the trees, and the mountains in the background

And now check out the difference, much more detail

1024x768 Performance Analysis

Terrain plays a less significant role at this resolution, but you will still incur an obvious difference in framerate (2-5%) when setting from Medium to High. Only budget cards need to steer clear from setting this to High.

1280x960 Performance Analysis

At this resolution Terrain has much more of an impact. The 8500 and the 5700U strain to provide decent gameplay at the High setting (average of 23 frames per second), and you will even get some choppiness from the 6600GT and the RX600XT (26 fps average). The rest of the cards fared well with Terrain set to High. The X850XT and the 6800GT provided us with very good results with 2xAA enabled.

Effects

Effects controls the amount of detail used to create special effects in the game. These effects include clouds of smoke, shrapnel from pistol fire, and the decals that form on certain animate and inanimate objects as a result of explosions and gunfire (such as bullet holes). This is not as important for true realism, but nitpickers may notice a slight difference when setting this too low. See if you notice the difference in the pictures below.

No bulletholes or shells here

Realism at the cost of frames per second

1024x768 Performance Analysis

There is no noticeable decrease in performance when this option is set to max. Even the budget cards seem to have no problem at this setting and resolution (1-3% max). Very slight choppiness can be experienced in scenes with many explosions and gunfire.

1280x960 Performance Analysis

No difference other than the budget cards realizing a bit more lag in large fight scenes (25-30 fps average). Set Budget cards to Medium to smooth out gameplay.