DirectX 9: Battlefield 2
Battlefield 2 might be one of the most impractical games to benchmark, but it has a very nifty feature that records the rendering time for every frame during the demo, and outputs the frame number, rendering time and FPS for every frame into a .csv file. This file can be opened and analyzed using Microsoft Excel or most other spreadsheet programs.
The results indicated that if it takes three seconds to click the "enter game" button and actually start the demo, the 999 FPS your computer outputs at the loading screen will significantly alter the correct average FPS rate. For consistent and reliable benchmark results from Battlefield 2 you have to delete all bogus entries in the .csv file.
Battlefield 2 was reputed to see large benefits from more system memory. While that surely is the case when comparing 512 MB to 1 GB, we didn't really notice much of a difference between 1 and 2 GB in the demo we used.
You might be looking at the graph and think to yourself that the 15% performance gain doesn't really seems to be that big of a deal. We agree that 75.9 FPS instead of 89.3 FPS would hardly be noticeable if we were to compare a fluid 75.9 FPS sequence of images to one with 89.3. However, you will probably come to a totally different conclusion after reviewing the other graph below.
