Benchmark Results: Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (DirectX 10/11)
Here again we have a title able to support DirectX 11, thus giving compared DirectX 10 cards a performance advantage—at least, you’d think so. But the GeForce GTX 285 and 295 both bring up the rear, leaving ATI’s Radeon HD 4870 X2 as the only contender to factor out of the apples-to-apples comparisons (and for what it’s worth, issues with the GeForce GTX 295 and Bad Company 2 seem to be fairly prevalent online).
All of our cards serve up what I’d consider playable performance at 1680x1050. Most interesting, perhaps, is that the GeForce GTX 480 and 470 sacrifice less of their performance in switching from 1x to 8x anti-aliasing, allowing the GeForce GTX 470 to jump in front of the Radeon HD 5870 with 8xAA enabled, even though the 5870 is faster without AA.
Shifting to 2560x1600 shows the Radeon HD 5970 still in its overwhelmingly-commanding lead. But while the GeForce GTX 480 would seem to fall to fourth place (behind the Radeon HD 5870), it actually scores a second-place finish once you turn on 8xAA.
ATI is able to maintain the fact that it sells the fastest card you can buy. However, with an expected price $200 below the Radeon HD 5970, the GeForce GTX 480 looks to be a contender here at $499. Of course, when you consider the Radeon HD 5870s already selling online at $419, Nvidia might have some work to do on its pricing.
