Medal Of Honor Warfighter Performance, Benchmarked

Features
By Don Woligroski
published

We take Medal of Honor Warfighter for a spin on 12 different graphics cards to figure out how much hardware you need to get this modern-day account of our Tier 1 operators' work running smoothly. Not surprisingly, the single-player campaign is GPU-heavy.

Test System And Graphics Hardware

As always, we strive to represent game performance across a wide range of graphics hardware. We're including cards as far down the spectrum as AMD's Radeon HD 6450 and Nvidia's GeForce GT 210, to the powerful Radeon HD 7970 and GeForce GTX 680.

Testing Notes

All overclocked boards in our collection are set to their reference specifications to best represent the like-performing products on the market, and to keep comparisons between models fair.

With no in-game benchmark tool available, we had to create one of our own. We chose the "Changing Tides" mission because its outdoor jungle environment was harder on performance than the urban areas. We were forced to benchmark by playing through the game as identically as possible for just over two minutes, and recording the action with Fraps. Fortunately, we determined the results to be both repeatable and subject to very little variance.

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Test System
CPUIntel Core i7-3960X (Sandy Bridge-E), 3.3 GHz @ 4.25 GHz , Six Cores, LGA 2011, 15 MB Shared L3 Cache, Hyper-Threading enabled.
MotherboardASRock X79 Extreme9 (LGA 2011) Chipset: Intel X79 Express
NetworkingOn-Board Gigabit LAN controller
MemoryCorsair Vengeance LP PC3-16000, 4 x 4 GB, 1600 MT/s, CL 8-8-8-24-2T
GraphicsGeForce 210 1 GB DDR3GeForce GT 630 512 MB GDDR5GeForce GTX 650 2 GB GDDR5GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1 GB GDDR5GeForce GTX 670 2 GB GDDR5GeForce GTX 680 2 GB GDDR5Radeon HD 6450 512 MB GDDR5Radeon HD 6670 512 MB DDR3Radeon HD 7750 1 GB GDDR5Radeon HD 7770 1 GB GDDR5Radeon HD 7850 1 GB GDDR5Radeon HD 7970 3 GB GDDR5
Hard DriveSamsung 470-series 256 GB (SSD)
PowerePower EP-1200E10-T2 1200 W ATX12V, EPS12V
Software and Drivers
Operating SystemMicrosoft Windows 8
DirectXDirectX 11.1
Graphics DriversCatalyst 12.11 beta 4, Nvidia 310.33 beta
Benchmarks
Medal of Honor: Warfighter"Changing Tides" Mission, Two-Minute Fraps Run
Don Woligroski
54 Comments Comment from the forums
  • mayankleoboy1
    Nice review! :)
    In CPU benchmark, it would have been better to see the continuous FPS graph , rather than just the single values of 'Average' and 'minimum' .

    Also, CPU frequency scaling is needed
    Reply
  • rmpumper
    No one is playing this crap. Why waist your time testing it?
    Reply
  • esrever
    Interesting that the 1gb on the 7850 starts showing signs of weakness at higher settings even at 1080p. The minimals went lower than the 7770 :o

    I think nvidia's gpu boost is causing the nvidia cards to have higher average and lower minimals since it can render higher fps when less things are going on but they can only have so much performance when the rendering gets tough. I think GPU boost is a pointless feature because of that since why would anyone want high maximal fps and low minimal fps?
    Reply
  • greghome
    No 7850 2GB to see if it's a memory bottleneck ? :/

    and you're missing the 7870 and 7950 in them. just sayin'
    Reply
  • JJ1217
    You put a 7850 1 GB, so now no one is going to buy a 7850 to play this game, as they'll get the wrong results due to memory bandwidth constraints. People who know about video ram will have no issue with this, but what about those looking for a good cheap video card to run games well? You pretty much just destroyed any chance of someone getting a 7850 for this game, due to the terrible gathering of results.

    Expected more from T.H to be honest.
    Reply
  • JJ1217
    Woops didn't mean memory bandwidth, meant amount of memory ^.^
    Reply
  • EzioAs
    10446769 said:
    No 7850 2GB to see if it's a memory bottleneck ? :/

    and you're missing the 7870 and 7950 in them. just sayin'

    I'm curious as well, though in my opinion it's most probably a memory bottleneck at 1080p wilth ultra settings. BF3 already uses more than 1GB with max image settings with 4xAA as well so if Warfighter uses an updated Frosbite2 engine, it's highly plausible.

    On the other hand, I'm not fully satisfied that they didn't test the game with the 7870. And how about 560ti and 6870(the 2 very popular card from last-gen), I think at least a couple mid-range card from last gen should be tested
    Reply
  • greghome
    EzioAshow about 560ti and 6870(the 2 very popular card from last-gen), I think at least a couple mid-range card from last gen should be tested
    i miss my 6950 on benchmarks.......
    Story of my hardware life.

    First Year, Wow Top of the line
    2nd Year, Still in benchmarks
    3rd Year, Still performing good enough
    4th Year......I need an uphrade
    Reply
  • the3dsgeek
    Can you please do a performance benchmark comparison of NFS most wanted? its running like shit on my GTX670
    Reply
  • ojas
    Liked the way you ran benchmarks, covered all major resolutions with all major detail levels across a wide spectrum of cards.

    Anyway, didn't really read your game review, but Rock, Paper, Shotgun was extremely critical of the game, and i understand their sentiment, because BF3 is similar in some respects.
    http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/10/29/wot-i-think-medal-of-honor-warfighter/

    P.S. Why you no benchmark Sleeping Dogs? It brings my GTX 560 down to 40 fps minimums at 1024x768 at the highest settings...It may be a CPU bottleneck though, have to look into that fully.
    Reply