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Battlefield 2 Optimization Guide September 05, 2005 Efstathios Papadopoulos |
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Summary: Are you disappointed with your PC's performance in Battlefield 2 but don't have the cash for an upgrade? If so, you may want to check out Stathi's BF2 Optimization Guide! Inside are descriptions and screenshots for all of BF2's video settings, as well as performance analysis for a variety of budget, mainstream, and high-end cards. See which settings run best for each class of hardware in this article!
 Introduction and Test Bed Setup | Page:: ( 1 / 7 ) |
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
| The Cards | Page:: ( 2 / 7 ) |
Pre-Game Attributes
Here you will see the pre-game attributes for all of the ATI cards. We used Catalyst version 5.8 (non Catalyst Control Center).
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The settings for the NVIDIA cards used in this optimization guide are shown below. We used Forceware Driver Version 77.77.
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*There is an image quality reduction on Nvidia cards when using any setting but the "High Quality". Texture filtering is optimized highly at any setting other than "High Quality" and you may experience texture shimmering at lower settings due to decreased quality. This problem will be fixed in future driver releases.
*Test Notes: This is not a video card comparison article, but an optimization guide for various cards. People with faster or slower systems will have different results than these shown. Fraps was used to record framerates during gameplay. The results combined with our own subjective evaluations were used for the Performance Analysis section of this article. Budget cards were tested at 1024x768. Mainstream cards tested at 1024x768 and 1280x960. The high-end cards were tested at 1024x768 and 1280x960 (and 2xAA was enabled at 1280x960 as well). Please note that higher resolutions were not tested as a display capable of 1600x1200 or higher was not available.
The cards were tested using all available settings to find the optimized results. These settings are located under the video options menu of the main menu. DirectX levels are kept at their native hardware levels. The Overall Quality setting was not used, since we want to be able to have complete control of our settings. All resolutions use 32-bit color with the default Direct3D options and Vertical Synchronization disabled.
| Main Menu, Terrain, and Effects | Page:: ( 3 / 7 ) |
Main Menu
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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.
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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.
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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.
| Geometry, Texture, and Lighting. | Page:: ( 4 / 7 ) |
Geometry
This setting definitely should do more in game than it does. Increasing the geometry only provides us with a bit of difference when going from the low to high setting, and even then the visual impact is minor. Geometry should make things like trees and buildings look more true to their natural form, and it should make these objects look sharper with more fine detail. Look at the pictures below and you will see only a slight difference between the two, even though the one is set to low and the other is set to high.
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1024x768 Performance Analysis
As mentioned above, there is a very slight difference in actual visual quality from Low to Medium to High. Setting this lower will give you a few extra FPS and will not reduce the quality of the game in terms of looks. Performance gained by setting from High to Low: 5-10%
1280x960 Performance Analysis
Same thing can be said about Geometry at this resolution. Budget cards set to Low, Mainstream set to Low or Medium and High-end set to High.
Texture
This setting adjusts the size of the textures used within Battlefield 2. By changing texture quality to “High”, larger, higher quality textures will be used. This setting depends heavily on the amount and speed of the onboard memory your graphics cards possesses. The more video memory onboard, the more your card can store locally, thus improving fluidity of your gaming. The flip side to this is the bandwidth of your VRAM. Faster memory leads to better performance.
Cards with 256MB of high-speed (450MHz+) memory are definitely the big winners in this category.
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1024x768 Performance Analysis
This setting is definitely influenced by the amount of memory on your graphics card. Setting this to Low for Budget cards is recommended. Some of the Mainstream cards may also want to set this to Medium or Low to improve gameplay. High-end cards ran very well at this setting (>65fps average with 2xAA).
1280x960 Performance Analysis
High-end cards need not worry about this resolution either. Mainstream cards except the X800 Pro and the 9800XT set this to Low. Budget cards set to Low.
Lighting
From Low to Medium to High, this setting virtually explains itself. This option sets lighting used on immovable objects like buildings and other inanimate things. Check out the screens below, with a smaller amount of light sources the building casts fewer shadows. As you can see, the difference is very noticeable!
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1024x768 Performance Analysis
Loading times are greatly affected by setting this higher than Medium. Budget cards set to Low, Mainstream to Medium, and High-end cards set this to High.
1280x960 Performance Analysis
Since we are climbing up resolution more of the same applies. At this setting, Mainstream and Budget need to be set to Low except for the X800Pro. High-end set to maximum.
| Dynamic Shadows, Dynamic Lights, Texture Filtering | Page:: ( 5 / 7 ) |
Dynamic Shadows
On the opposite side, dynamic shadows sets the level of detail used for drawing shadows for moving objects like people, trees, foliage, and vehicles. Since most of the shadows you will actually pay attention to are people’s shadows, we feel there is a definite need to use a high setting here. However, the performance impact is dramatic as you go higher with this setting. That makes sense, as real time shadow calculations are going to tax your graphics card. The pictures below show you what this setting affects.
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1024x768 Performance Analysis
Dynamic Shadows has a huge performance hit when set to Medium and High, especially in areas of heavy traffic during gameplay. High-end cards can set this to max (>50fps with 2xAA). Mainstream and budget would be best off with Low (14-34fps).
1280x960 Performance Analysis
More pixels means less performance. Set the Mainstream cards to Low. Budget cards can be set to Off. The X850XT can be set to High but change to Medium for the 6800GT, especially if you want to utilize 2xAA.
Dynamic Lights
Dynamic Lights affects the way lighting is handled for making explosions, muzzle flashes, and fire look more realistic. The difference from setting it to low and to high is so unnoticeable that is does not warrant setting very high if your system can’t handle it. See if you can notice the difference between the different settings:
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1024x768 Performance Analysis
Dynamic Light has slightly less of a performance drop associated with it than Dynamic Shadows using higher settings. The 6800GT and the X850XT should be on High with 2xAA enabled. Mainstream can be set to Medium and Budget set to Low.
1280x960 Performance Analysis
The only trouble with the High-end cards were the lag that was noticed with the 6800GT when enabling 2xAA and using High as the setting (28-48fps during scenes). The X850XT did just fine (>50fps). The Mainstream cards should be using Medium except for the 6600GT and the X600XT which should utilize the Low options along with the Budget cards.
Texture Filtering
Battlefield 2’s texture filtering setting controls the type of texture filtering used. When this setting is set to “Low”, trilinear filtering is used. The “Medium” and “High” settings both use anisotropic filtering, with medium using 2xAF, and High, 4xAF.
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1024x768 Performance Analysis
If you’re into eye candy, you’re going to want to run this setting as high as you can. Recommendations would be High-end and Mainstream set to High and Budget set to Medium.
1280x960 Performance Analysis
Same thing applies to 1280x960. The only difference here is to apply the Low setting to the 6600GT with the budget cards.
| Recommended Settings | Page:: ( 6 / 7 ) |
The recommended settings are based off of the performance analysis above and trying to get the best possible picture quality while maintaining a fluid frame rate. People with faster or slower systems will have different results than the ones described in this article. The focus was finding that perfect mix for every card.
Starting with...
High-end Cards: Sapphire Radeon X850XT PE, NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT
- Sapphire Radeon X850XT PE: No problems with this card running full quality and with 2xAA enabled. It has smooth gameplay and the game looked absolutely fantastic! Even when this card was maxed out at our monitor’s 1280x960 resolution it still ran flawlessly. Those with displays capable of higher resolutions should be able to run 1600x1200 without AA with few slowdowns, and enabling 2xAA may be possible depending on your desired framerate.
- NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT: The 6800GT had its ups and downs more due to kicking me out of the game during loading. Of course, that was an occasional downer. The 6800GT put up a good fight with the X850XT, but had occasional jerkiness at 1280x960 in screens where many explosions were occurring and when being set at 2xAA. At 1024x768, go ahead and set everything High and enable full 2xAA (around 60fps). At 1280x960, set everything to High and disable 2xAA (58fps).
Mainstream Cards: Gigabyte GV-R80P256D, ATI Radeon 9800XT, Sapphire Radeon X700Pro 256MB, e-GeForce 6600GT, MSI Radeon RX600XT-TD128E
- Gigabyte GV-R80P256D: A very solid performer overall. At 1024x768 the X800 Pro ran smooth at around 50-53 fps on average with everything set to High. 1280x960 resulted in around 48-50fps.
- ATI Radeon 9800XT: Smooth running at 1024x768 averaging out around 48fps with all settings at High. To maintain this framerate at 1280x960, set dynamic lights to Medium.
- Sapphire Radeon X700Pro 256MB: This card put up a good fight with the 9800XT. At 1024x768 it was edged out by an average of 2fps. The 9800XT pulled a bit farther away at 1280x960 by around 5fps (43).
- e-GeForce 6600GT: With a fan blowing on it and after multiple reboots and crashes, the card finally got through testing. Hopefully, our problems were caused by the specific card and are not representative of what others will experience. At 1024x768 Terrain, Geometry, Dynamic Lighting, and Dynamic Shadows were set to High and the result was about 34fps averaged out. At 1280x960, we had playable results with Terrain, Geometry, and Effects set to High.
- MSI Radeon RX600XT-TD128E: For an XT card we would think this card would do more for the average gamer. Handled Terrain and Geometry set to High and still shot out around 31-35fps at 1024x768. At 1280x960, the 128MB of GPU memory started to weigh the card down, and so Textures needed to be set to Low to maintain the 31-35fps average.
Budget Cards: ATI Radeon 8500, GeForce FX 5700 Ultra
- ATI Radeon 8500: At 1024x768 medium settings should be used across the board, except for Texture Filtering set to High to catch those enemies from afar. This should put you at a steady 27-29fps on average. 1280x960 we start to see great lag and jerkiness with these same settings. Set Dynamic Lights, Dynamic Shadows, and Textures to Medium or Low if needed to give you a boost in framerate.
- GeForce FX 5700 Ultra: Performed a bit better than the 8500 overall. Provided us with and average of 32fps at 1024x768 with Terrain set to High. At 1280x960, the 5700Ultra pumped out around 30fps with all settings at Medium.
*Remember some of these game settings are not GPU dependent, so a faster machine than the ones used in these tests will provide better results. Battlefield 2 runs flawlessly with more memory. 2GB is what you should think about to run with no jerkiness or lag. 1GB is a decent amount but you will still get choppy occasionally even with the fastest graphics card.
| Conclusion | Page:: ( 7 / 7 ) |
No joke here guys. Battlefield 2 was a great game to test. Its fantastic gameplay and superb graphics make it one of the best games I have ever set my hands on. The only downside is testing it. There is no easy way to benchmark this game in my eyes. The constant quitting and loading new graphics settings, waiting to optimize shaders, and then running FRAPS for a specified time consumed a whole lot of time. But it was well worth it. Not only this, but now I can actually sit down and enjoy playing the game (I have since become an expert at most levels). I hope you enjoyed this one as you have the rest of them. Until next time, take care and god bless!
*Special thanks to Trogdor for his help. Tons of his help and input were used in making this article. Burn away my friend!
*Special thanks also to Rashly for his comments.
*Note: This is not a video card comparison article, but a tweaking guide for various cards. Overclocking your video card may result in higher FPS, but may also lead to display corruption.