Star Wars: Battlefront Benchmarked

Introduction


This isn't a game review. Star Wars: Battlefront doesn't have a single-player campaign anyway, and debating the pros and cons of the title's map design is a futile effort. There are a few single-player and co-op missions that ease new players into the game. But there's certainly not enough content to keep an offline player engaged for long.

We'll leave the opinions about game play to the software reviewers and concentrate our efforts on the playability of Star Wars using different hardware configurations. When it comes to graphics, EA scores major points. Its proprietary Frostbite 3 engine now employs physics-based rendering (PBR), which is used to great effect.


Using physics to model the interactions between lighting, surface structures and materials is popular these days. This approach might trivialize the underlying laws, but it's undeniable that the end result is a more realistic visual experience.

This way, the developers kill two birds with one stone, simplifying programming/minimizing potential errors and dialing back hardware requirements, since optimized libraries take care of the heavy lifting.

A nice side effect is the lighting model (Global Illumination) that everything's based on. It looks great on even the lowest-end graphics cards.

The vegetation and character models from the Star Wars universe are very detailed, owing to great textures and ample geometry.

As opposed to traditional 3D scans, photogrammetry uses pictures taken from different angles. A specialized software package computes the necessary meshes and vertices, representing the corner points of a complex object's individual surfaces. That's critical to the finished product's visual quality and performance.

Additional algorithms can be used to automatically make an object simpler. For instance, unnecessary or invalid surfaces can be deleted, and vertices that are very close to each other can be merged. As a (welcome) side effect of this approach, textures can be mapped to vertices exactly since they're generated at the same time. These highly-optimized models yield great performance, even if the environments are fairly complex.

Like most current titles, Star Wars Battlefront doesn't support Mantle or DirectX 12. However, the game's graphics engine is tuned so well that it still runs smoothly and looks good on older hardware.

MORE: Best Graphics Cards For The Money
MORE: All Graphics Content

  • Ck1v1
    first of all.

    why is this so late?
    second, why is this running old drivers that nobody uses anymore.

    new drivers have solved lots of issues and with increased performance, especially for AMD.

    Also 290 running 1440p with the real life mod and everything set to ultra runs the game at 80fps, and thats with a 4670k @ 4.4ghz
    Reply
  • FormatC
    The review was published at November the 23th 2015 in German and the drivers were really fresh at this time.
    http://www.tomshardware.de/star-wars-battlefront-grafikkarten-benchmark-hardware-anforderungen,testberichte-241982.html

    I have no idea why this review was over two months in the US pipeline :(
    Reply
  • rambodas
    I want a new GPU for BF4 and the next battlefield release.My 650 ti boost died on me.My rig : i5 3450,8 gb ddr3,500 watt CM PSU,monitor 60 Hz 1600*900( may update to 1080p in the future).My budget around 250$.
    Reply
  • Cryio
    I want a new GPU for BF4 and the next battlefield release.My 650 ti boost died on me.My rig : i5 3450,8 gb ddr3,500 watt CM PSU,monitor 60 Hz 1600*900( may update to 1080p in the future).My budget around 250$.

    Either get a 380 4 GB now, or wait for Polaris and Pascal. Though that may take the duration of the year to launch.
    Reply
  • arielmansur
    Please tell me need for speed will have this same optimization : D
    Reply
  • -Fran-
    Nice to see the Fury X leading the big budget cards.

    Cheers!
    Reply
  • Sakkura
    The colors in the 1080p chart are a mess.

    The HIS R9 290, Sapphire R9 380X, HIS HD7970, and MSI R9 380 show up in green.

    The Gigabyte GTX 780, GTX 690, and MSI GTX 770 show up in red.
    Reply
  • Onus
    Rambodas, your CM "500W" PSU may not be. Still, it should safely handle a GTX960.
    Reply
  • ykki
    Hey Toms if an article is two months late then consider one thing - don't publish it.
    Reply
  • blppt
    Wondering why you list the FX-8350 in the test system box when there are no cpu benchmarks here.
    Reply