Today's Hard|Forum Post
Today's Hard|Forum Post
Date:
Thursday , October 10, 2013
Author:
David Schroth
Editor:
Brent Justice
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Battlefield 4 Beta Performance Preview

Electronic Arts has opened a public beta of the upcoming Battlefield 4 game debuting the new Frostbite 3 game engine. Today we will preview some gameplay performance in BF4 Beta on an AMD Radeon R9 280X and GeForce GTX 770 and see how the game will challenge today's GPU's. The results are not quite what we expected.

Introduction

Earlier this year, Electronic Arts and DICE introduced Battlefield 4 to the world as the next title in the long running Battlefield series. With that introduction, a new graphics engine called Frostbite 3 was announced. The new engine builds upon Frostbite 2, which was introduced two years ago with Battlefield 3. The improvements include enhanced tessellation technology and improved in-game destruction capabilities. The engine will also power other upcoming titles including Need for Speed: Rivals, Star Wars: Battlefront, DragonAge: Inquisition and Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare.

Battlefield 4 Beta

Battlefield 4 Beta opened its doors on October 1, 2013 to those who had earned an early access pass and later on October 4, 2013, the unwashed public was allowed to join the beta which will be available until October 15th. Commander mode has returned from Battlefield 2 as well as many of the popular multiplayer game types while introducing a few new ones.

Within the beta, the Siege of Shanghai is available for the multiplayer conquest mode of play. The map features a typical conquest arrangement of five flags spread across a city with a variety of tall buildings, rivers, and sweeping views of the countryside that lies just beyond its borders. The map gives you a variety of options to get around, including vehicles, boats, and helicopters to keep the denizens of Shanghai close to home.

Our understanding of the beta is that not all graphical features that will be included with the full release of Battlefield 4 are included in the Beta, thus our expectation is that performance could be lower and more demanding with the retail game compared to the beta that is currently going on. Better textures, more graphical features, and better quality of effects are expected.

System Requirements

Several weeks ago, Electronic Arts announced the minimum and recommended PC system requirements for Battlefield 4. The minimum requirements were not very surprising to gamer's as by requiring at least a Radeon HD 3870 or a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT with 512MB of video memory; most any mid-level or upper-end discrete GPU purchased in the past several years should be sufficient to meet the stated minimum requirements of Battlefield 4.

Diving further into the recommended requirements, we found that EA asking for a rather challenging set of requirements, including the use of an AMD Radeon HD 7870 (now known as the R9 270X) and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660. The requirements also recommend at least 3GB of graphics memory to be available to the game. While many cards have been equipped with this much memory for a few years, it is still not the norm to find cards other than the AMD Radeon HD 7970 or AMD Radeon HD 7950 to have 3GB of RAM.

There are also higher than usual CPU and memory requirements. For AMD processors, a six-core CPU is recommended and with Intel processors, merely a quad core processor is recommended along with at least 8GB of system memory.

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