NVIDIA Puts Its (New) Cards on the Table

Battlefield 1942 - Secret Weapons Of WWII

This is the newest version of the very popular first person shooter from EA Games. The game uses the so-called Refractor II 3D engine, which uses neither pixel nor vertex shader. As the game offers no benchmark or replay modes, we tested the in-game performance "by hand."

We started a local server with the map "Hoolendoorn" and played as an axis soldier. After spawning, we walked towards an unmanned tank, got in and drove it along a pre-determined route. After arriving at the end of this little trip, we got out and did a 360° turn. Since we can't guarantee that we got the completely same route every time, give the scores below a tolerance of +/- 2-4 frames.

At first the FX 5950 does a good job of keeping up with ATi's Radeon 9800 family, but has to cede more and more ground at the higher resolutions. In Battlefield 1942, the FX 5700 Ultra is clearly slower than the Radeon9600 XT.