Battlefield 4 Beta Performance: 16 Graphics Cards, Benchmarked

Features
By Don Woligroski
published

We spent our weekend playing the Battlefield 4 multiplayer beta, and made sure to capture a ton of performance data with lots of PC hardware. Does your system have what it takes to handle this title? It comes out this month; you'd better look and see!

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.

Don Woligroski
205 Comments Comment from the forums
  • corvetteguy1994
    My system is good to go!


    ****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****
    Reply
  • CaptainTom
    Looks about right. My 7970 @ 1165/1805 gets 50-60+ FPS. But no quad core i7's?
    Reply
  • itzsnypah
    Why did you use a Titan for the CPU benchmarks when you have the GTX 690 / HD7990 delivering ~30% more FPS?
    Reply
  • slomo4sho
    Any particular reason why only the 2500K was overclocked in the CPU benchmarks and why the FX-4170 was benchmarked in place of the 4300 or 6300?
    Reply
  • BigMack70
    Would love to see some more detailed CPU benchmarks on a full 64 man conquest server once the game comes out... from some other data out there it looks possible that BF4 multiplayer is the first game to actually benefit from Hyperthreaded i7s over their i5 counterparts.

    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.
    Reply
  • BigMack70
    Why would they mention Mantle in an article about beta performance?
    Reply
  • loops
    I have an 2500k and an 7870xt (7930). As long as I dont max out AA I tend to be able to play at 45-50 fps with a mix of high/ultra on 1080p/ 24" screen.

    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 ?
    Reply
  • smeezekitty
    I think they focused too much on the bottom end cards (6450, 210). I think anybody that has less than a 6670 probably won't be buying BF4.

    I also wish they tested a Radeon and Geforce card that would be considered equal to see how it performs by brand.
    Reply
  • nevilence
    I have a 7770 and an i5, runs pretty clean on high, wouldnt want to bump up to ultra though, that would likely suck
    Reply
  • slomo4sho
    11689688 said:
    Weird that there is absolutely no mention of Mantle when BF4 is going to be the first game to implement it.

    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...
    Reply