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3D Performance with Battlefield 2 Demo: Part 1 High-end Cards June 16, 2005 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: The sequel to the hit Battlefield 1942, Battlefield 2 is poised to be one of the most exciting releases this summer. Last week EA released a playable demo of BF2, providing an enticing sneak peek of the game. In today's article we examine the performance of ATI and NVIDIA's most popular 16-pipeline cards, the GeForce 6800 GT and 6800 Ultra, as well as the RADEON X850 XT PE and RADEON X800 XL. The cards are tested in resolutions ranging from 1024x768 up to 2048x1536, with various AA/AF settings. See who comes out on top in performance and image quality in this article!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 9 ) |
In case you didn’t know, Battlefield 2 is the sequel to the hit first-person shooter Battlefield 1942, only it’s set in a modern combat environment. In the game you can play as the US, Chinese, or the Middle East Coalition. Battlefield 2 is built on an entirely new game engine with both single-player and multi-player modes, but as in BF1942, you’ll likely want to play multi. Up to 64 players can join a server with, according to EA, “maps that scale to the number of players engaging in battle for a unique and intense experience every time.”
Like BF1942, with BF2 you can hop in vehicles ranging from tanks, armored personnel carriers, and trucks, to helicopters and jets, with 30 vehicles available at your disposal. BF2 also includes a wide range of small-arms weaponry, including pistols, sub-machine guns, and assault rifles, as well as fragmentation grenades, C4, and missiles. The vehicles and weapons aren’t straight out of some programmer’s head either, they’re all real-world weapons in use by militaries around the world (with the exception of the Joint Strike Fighter and SU-34, neither of which has officially entered service yet).
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If you played the Desert Combat mod for Battlefield 1942, you’ll likely feel right at home in Battlefield 2, as the game feels the same in many ways. DICE has added new classes and a new experience system with stats, but fundamentally the concept is largely the same, only with a few tweaks here and there, and of course better graphics.
Compatibility
Whenever a new game comes out there are always concerns of bugs and compatibility issues with certain hardware, Battlefield 2 appears to be no exception. Already there are numerous reports of problems with the multiplayer browser, which can lock up and performs sluggishly. Considering BF2’s emphasis on multi-player, this is an issue that EA/DICE should definitely look into for the game’s retail release next week. Some ATI users have also reported problems with BF2, but we didn’t encounter any issues during our testing with CATALYST 5.6 other than a few flashing textures at 2048x1536 with the X850 XT Platinum Edition, NVIDIA users are encouraged in the demo to use beta drivers, ForceWare 77.30, these are actually newer than the beta drivers NVIDIA provides on nZone!
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Fortunately we can report that we didn’t run into a single issue with the GeForce 6800 GT or Ultra when running 77.30.
With the system’s set up we were eager to see how the ATI and NVIDIA cards performed, but first let’s take a look at image quality…
| Image Quality | Page:: ( 2 / 9 ) |
Anti-aliasing
You can see this pretty clearly in our Battlefield 2 AA screenshots, both the X850 XT PE and GeForce 6800 Ultra do a very good job of removing the jaggies in our reference image:
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Zooming in on the antenna however reveals a slight edge for ATI’s X850 RADEON XT PE:
RADEON X850 XT PE 4xAA
GeForce 6800 Ultra 4xAA
You can also see edges on ATI’s card are slightly sharper on the top edge of the bunker in the screenshot above:
RADEON X850 XT PE 4xAA
GeForce 6800 Ultra 4xAA
Anisotropic filtering
While you can clearly see ATI’s edge in AA with Battlefield 2, anisotropic filtering is a much more subjective topic, what looks “superior” to one person’s eyes may look inferior to another. In addition, the environments in BF2 are so large that turning on this feature does come with a significantly greater performance hit than we’ve seen in previous titles. You’ll see this in our performance benchmarks in the following pages.
Therefore, rather than providing a winner and loser, we’ll just provide a sample image for representing each card’s AF quality:
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How we tested
Normally whenever we benchmark with a new title, we like to use custom demos we’ve recorded of actual gameplay. Once we’ve recorded our demo, we then use FRAPS or the game’s built-in timedemo feature to record an average frame rate, and in some cases the minimum and maximum frame rates as well.
By using demos to measure performance, we’re assured that each card tested is handling the exact same identical workload. This ensures repeatable results regardless of the hardware used, or graphics driver used. The other method we will sometimes use is running through the game and recording the frame rate with FRAPS.
This method is a little more tricky, as variables within the game can prevent you from getting an identical workload from graphics card to graphics card. For instance, during periods of inactivity in games like BF2, your character may automatically perform involuntary actions such as flexing his hands or toying around with the weapon you’re currently holding. In Far Cry, birds would randomly fly across the screen, while in BF2 the grass in front of you will flow with the wind.
Basing performance on a combat sequence with this testing method is a definite no-no, as your enemy may use his rifle to shoot at you with one card, and toss a grenade at you while you’re testing performance with a second card. As you can certainly imagine, this would have a profound difference in performance. This isn’t a problem when using recorded demos to test cards, as your enemy does the same thing every time.
In this case, since BF2 doesn’t provided demo recording functionality, we had to use the second method. To ensure the results were as repeatable as possible we created an empty server, hopped on it, and ran down the same path each time, with FRAPS running in the background recording our frame rate. We repeated this procedure three times per card for each resolution/setting, so at 1600x1200 we ran the GeForce 6800 Ultra three times at 1600x1200 before proceeding on to 2048x1536. We took the average of the three runs.
| Test Systems | Page:: ( 3 / 9 ) |
System Setup
AMD Athlon 64 4000+
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium
1GB OCZ DDR400 SDRAM
ATI RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition
ATI RADEON X800 XL
Driver version CATALYST 5.6
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT
Driver version 77.30
250GB Maxtor Hard Drive Maxline III SATA Hard Drive w/16MB Cache
Windows XP Professional SP1
DirectX 9.0c
Benchmarks
Battlefield 2 Demo
| BF2 Performance | Page:: ( 4 / 9 ) |
Battlefield 2 – Direct3D
| Battlefield 2 Performance 1280x1024x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 6800 Ultra | 67 | 84 |
| GeForce 6800 GT | 60 | 76 |
| RADEON X850 XT PE | 72 | 95 |
| RADEON X800 XL | 58 | 75 |
| ||
| 4xAA | Page:: ( 5 / 9 ) |
Battlefield 2 – Direct3D
| Battlefield 2 Performance 1280x1024x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 6800 Ultra | 55 | 65 |
| GeForce 6800 GT | 50 | 60 |
| RADEON X850 XT PE | 55 | 77 |
| RADEON X800 XL | 50 | 60 |
| ||
| Performance Impact of 4xAA | Page:: ( 6 / 9 ) |
Battlefield 2 – Direct3D
| 4xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 7 / 9 ) |
Battlefield 2 – Direct3D
| Battlefield 2 Performance 1280x1024x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 6800 Ultra | 41 | 52 |
| GeForce 6800 GT | 38 | 48 |
| RADEON X850 XT PE | 41 | 65 |
| RADEON X800 XL | 33 | 50 |
| ||
| Performance Impact of 8xAF | Page:: ( 8 / 9 ) |
Battlefield 2 – Direct3D
| Conclusion | Page:: ( 9 / 9 ) |
First, we ran AA image quality tests with the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition and GeForce 6800 Ultra. In our opinion, the RADEON X850 XT PE produced sharper visuals when both cards were running in their 4xAA modes. It’s not that the GeForce 6800 Ultra looks bad, rather the RADEON X850 XT looks ever so slightly crisper. You can also see this in the hillside on the left in our AF screenshots.
Performance results were also close, with the RADEON X850 XT PE outperforming the GeForce 6800 Ultra overall, but the 6800 Ultra did win a few benchmarks. The X850 XT PE clearly performed faster without AA/AF, and came out ahead in 4xAA testing, but the GeForce 6800 Ultra’s superior efficiency at handling 8xAF allowed it to narrow the gap separating it from the X850 XT PE once 4xAA/8xAF was turned on, ultimately coming out ahead at 2048x1536 with 4xAA/8xAF.
Based on our testing, it looks like the X850 XT PE is a little more efficient than the GeForce 6800 Ultra at handling AA, while the 6800 Ultra is more resourceful than the X850 XT when it comes to AF.
Since the GeForce 6800 GT only trails the 6800 Ultra by 50MHz in core and memory clock speeds, it was able to put up a strong fight against the X800 XL, taking the overall performance crown, but again, ATI’s AA efficiency did keep things close in 4xAA testing. The GeForce 6800 GT ultimately pulled away once 4xAA/8xAF was enabled though.
Of course, keep in mind that we’re testing with a fairly small map in Battle of Oman, so we’ll be curious to see how the game performs on larger 64-player maps. We also hope EA/DICE will implement some form of demo recording functionality, so we can record gameplay demos with more action on the screen. Right now we’re able to provide a rough look at early Battlefield 2 performance, and so far it looks pretty good for both ATI and NVIDIA users alike, just make sure to use the latest drivers for optimal results.