Battlefield 4 Beta Performance: 16 Graphics Cards, Benchmarked

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: High Quality, 1680x1050

Now we shift from Low to High detail at 1680x1050. As mentioned, we're skipping the Medium preset entirely because it didn't give us any perceptible performance advantage compared to High.

Aside from the texture and model detail improvements we get in this transition, the High preset adds deferred anti-aliasing and HBAO ambient occlusion.

All of these cards maintain more than 30 FPS, but AMD's Radeon HD 7770 struggles more than the rest to stay above that boundary.

Frame rate over time charting shows that the Radeon HD 7770 shifts between 35 and 45 FPS over the course of the test. This is acceptable, even for a fast-paced shooter, though we naturally prefer more powerful solutions that don't drop below 40 FPS. The 7770's advantage is that it's the cheapest card on our chart by a significant margin.

Frame time variance hurts the Radeon HD 7770's story. It regularly pops above 15 ms using the High preset, which we've seen as noticeable latency in blind testing. You don't want numbers that high if you're sensitive to stutter. On the other hand, the rest of the solutions fare quite well.

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