Introduction

4.5 days with Battlefield 2142 Beta

Last week we took a look at Battlefield 2142’s performance with today’s latest high-end graphics cards from both ATI and NVIDIA. We then followed that story up with a CPU performance article that examined the performance impact a faster CPU has on performance. In the end we found that the graphics card played a greater role in BF2142’s performance at the settings most people are going to play the game in: higher resolutions with AA/AF turned on.

With those two articles out of the way, we were eager to see how Battlefield performed with more affordable mainstream graphics cards. We wiped the testbeds hard drives clean, re-installed the OS and Battlefield, and proceeded to get down to testing. We first had to settle on the graphics settings we’d use for the mainstream graphics testing, as you certainly can’t crank all the detail settings up to their maximums and expect to get adequate performance from a mainstream $100-$200 graphics card in Battlefield 2142 with AA/AF turned on (and you’re going to want to play this game with AA fellas, as the jaggies on foliage in the game can get pretty irritating without it). Just when we thought we had the settings figured out, we threw a GeForce 6600 GT 128MB into the mix and found testing to be too frustrating of an experience with manual FRAPS walkthroughs at those settings – we had to go back to the drawing board and find lower settings.

Ultimately we settled on just leaving everything at the “Medium” setting, with the exception of texture detail, which was left at “High” as we didn’t want to compromise there, and found that the new settings delivered a good mix of image quality without sacrificing performance too bad for the cards being tested, including the good ‘ol GeForce 6600 GT.

With that out of the way, we proceeded to test five different NVIDIA GPUs, the GeForce 6600 GT, 6800 GS, 7600 GS/GT, and finally, the recently announced GeForce 7900 GS in both single-card and SLI configurations, and threw in a 7900 GTX for good measure to compare against the SLI rigs. With our testing complete, we called it a day and decided to wrap up testing with the ATI cards saved for the next day, Monday. Things were looking good until we launched the beta on Monday late morning only to find that the trial period had ended a day earlier than expected.

Doh!

So we don’t have ATI benchmark results for this article, but we’ve got lots of good data on NVIDIA’s mainstream graphics lineup and how it performs in Battlefield 2142, so we figured you’d like to see our results anyway.