Multi-Card Scaling In Battlefield: Bad Company 2
In what is becoming a familiar story, the two Radeon HD 6970s claim first-place finishes in all three resolutions, with the 6950s and 570s trading places below. AMD’s Radeon HD 6870s in CrossFire serve up playable performance across the board, but they’re much slower than the other three configurations tested here.
I chose 2560x1600 as the best resolution to compare scaling performance because, if you’re spending $700 or $800 on graphics, you should probably be running a 30” screen or a trio of 23” displays in Eyefinity or Surround. The fact that we’re still seeing 80 and 90 frames per second on average at the highest settings Battlefield: Bad Company 2 offers at that resolution affirms just how much graphics muscle is at our disposal.
The Radeon HD 6900-series cards handle it in stride. A pair of Radeon HD 6950s achieves what can only be described as idea scaling performance, while the 6970s fare just a tad worse than Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 570s. Meanwhile, the 1 GB Radeon HD 6870s put down less compelling numbers—most likely a result of that frame buffer inhibiting performance.
