Results: Low Quality, 1280x720
Our first set of tests involves the Low detail preset and 1280x720. Unless you're gaming on a smaller screen using lower-end hardware, this isn't a particularly lush way to enjoy Battlefield 4. But we want to see how budget-oriented graphics hardware handles the game.
Sub-$50 cards like the Radeon HD 6450 and GeForce 210 get booted from this competition before it even begins. You'll need a Radeon HD 6670 DDR3, Radeon HD 6750, or GeForce GT 630 GDDR5 to manage playable frame rates at this setting. That's not good news for integrated graphics engines, except for higher-end options like AMD's A8/A10 APUs and Intel's Iris Pro 5200.
Charting frame rate over time illustrates the GeForce 210 and Radeon HD 6450 struggling, while the Radeon HD 7770 and GeForce GTX 650 Ti power through these settings to maintain at least 60 FPS through the test.
When it comes to frame time variance, the Radeon HD 6450 behaves poorly. While the GeForce 210 encounters fewer spikes, low frame rates make that a moot point. The rest of the cards fare well enough, almost always staying below 10 milliseconds of variance.
****EDIT BY TOM'S HARDWARE****
Sorry, corvetteguy, you're the first so I'm going to hijack your post to answer some common questions:
- Why didn't you mention mantle?I probably *should* have mentioned it, but at this point it seems a little early. We don't know that much about it and we don't even know exactly when it arrives. Rest assured, when Mantle is rolled out we will cover it!
- Why did you use a Titan in the CPU tests instead of the dual-GPU 690 or 7990?Dual-GPU performance can be tricky, and without FCAT working, I didn't want to report potential pie-in-the-sky FRAPS performance that is difficult to verify. Titan is the fastest single GPU card we have.
- Why no FX-6000 CPU?We benched the FX-4170 and FX-8350. The FX-6000 will be in between, there wasn't a colossal spread so it seems pretty straightforward.
- For the love of everything good and pure, why did you use IE?Haha! Lots of comments on this. I used it because it was there - remember, we clean install for our benchmarks, so unless the test involves browsers we don't bother investing time installing anything else. For the record I feel dirty and violated having opened the software, but you should all know that my personal PC has both Firefox and Chrome installed. :)
Hope that clarifies things!
- Don Woligroski
****END OF EDIT BY TOM'S HARDWARE****
In 64 man conquest games, doing a FRAPS benchmark of an entire 30 minute round, I got a minimum framerate of 42, average of 74, and max of 118 on my rig (4.8 GHz 2600k || 780 SLI @ 1100/1500 || 16GB DDR3 2133c11) at 1440p with all settings maxed and 120 fov.
Also interesting to see 2GB cards struggling at high res on this game. I really didn't think we'd see that so soon, given that the 780/Titan/7950/7970 are the only cards yet released with >2GB standard memory.
But not matter what, each time that main building is blown up I loss at least 5 fps for the rest of the round and have big time fps/lag spikes.
Imo you want an 7970/280x and a quad core to be able to play smooth.
Also, I hear a lot about vram...what is the feed back on 2 gigs vs 3 ?
I also wish they tested a Radeon and Geforce card that would be considered equal to see how it performs by brand.
Considering that mantle wont be available until December, why would it be mentioned? Especially considering the fact that none of the "new" AMD GPUs were included in the benchmarks...