- Date:
- Sunday , November 17, 2013
- Author:
- David Schroth
- Editor:
- Brent Justice
- Share:

Battlefield 4 Video Card Performance and IQ Review
Battlefield 4 is this holiday season's blockbuster from the Battlefield series. It features the brand new Frostbite 3 game engine which provides a higher level of realism in the game. We strap 8 video cards to the test bench to see what kind of gameplay experience is delivered under Windows 8.1.
Gameplay Summary
From a gameplay performance perspective, the AMD Radeon HD 290X came out on the top of the heap, finding itself playable at 2560x1600 with all in-game settings set to maximum values and 2X MSAA enabled. The GeForce GTX TITAN followed by being playable at the same settings, however, it produced an average frame rate about 10FPS below that of the R9 290X.
Taking a step down from the top two performers, the AMD Radeon R9 290, AMD Radeon R9 280X and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 were all playable at 2560x1600 with all in-game settings set to maximum values and low FXAA enabled. The GeForce GTX 770 was able to play at 1920x1080 with all in-game settings set to maximum values and 2X MSAA enabled.
Rounding out the lineup, both the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 and the AMD Radeon R9 270X was capable of playing at 1920x1080 with all in-game settings set to maximum values and low FXAA enabled.
From an overall gameplay perspective, it seems that the Frostbite 3 engine has gone a long way to prevent significant sudden frame rate dips from impacting the gaming experience. Playing Battlefield 3, these frame rate dips (for example, when taking out a tank) could easily render your ability to escape from the situation futile. With Battlefield 4, these dips do not feel like these bring action to a halt.
What was more disconcerting was the inconsistent performance between AMD and NVIDIA cards. Overall, AMD cards tended to perform better than the NVIDIA counterpart at the particular price point, with the exception of the GeForce GTX 760 vs. the Radeon R9 270X.
With each NVIDIA card, we observed frame rates to be far more varied than AMD based cards over the course of playing the game with them. It almost seems that the performance concerns that we had with NVIDIA cards during our Beta evaluation have only been partially fixed at this point.
The VRAM Debate
Many people may be quick to point out that Battlefield 4’s recommended system configuration calls for at least 3GB of video memory as a potential reason for the inconsistent performance. The GTX 770 and GTX 760 within this evaluation only have 2GB of video memory while the AMD cards from the 280X have at least 3GB. We do not think that a lack of video memory is the root cause of the inconsistent NVIDIA performance as it was also readily apparent on both the GTX 780 and GTX TITAN.
Speaking of memory configurations, in most cases, cards with 3GB of memory or more would usually see a video memory usage of about 2.25GB at any given time while gaming. However, for cards with less than 3GB, we typically observed about 1.75GB of memory being used.
The Nature of Multiplayer Gaming
When looking at overall performance of a game like this it is very difficult to benchmark on any sort of a consistent basis. Many of the multiplayer maps featured rainstorms that would appear at seemingly random intervals. The rainstorms added an interesting element as the lighting within the map changed, however, it also came at a 10-15FPS performance penalty.
Levolution also seemed to contribute to inconsistent frame rates as there were some instances on maps where after a large building was leveled, performance would be lower until a lot of the dust and debris began to settle. This is why only real-world game playing, and not benchmarks or timedemos, have to be done to get the real information on how this game performs.
Image Quality and Graphics Options
Battlefield 4 feels much like an evolutionary step above and beyond Battlefield 3 from an overall graphics quality perspective. The addition of an SSAA function is also much welcomed. The environmental changes that came with Frostbite 3 are what sets the game above and beyond its predecessor. Additional weather effects, vastly improved water interactivity and "levolution" that adds destruction of epic proportions.
Getting into actual settings, the eight cards that we tested were all able to play at least at 1920x1080 resolution with the Ultra presets enabled, so a lot of our image quality focus was analyzing the impact of FXAA, MSAA, and SSAA within the game.
We observed that FXAA significantly reduced the overall image quality of many of the textures within the game in order to bring its benefit of anti-aliasing across the polygon textures and alpha textures within the game. Quite frankly, when FXAA was set to the high level, we paused to clean our glasses as we thought that they were well smudged with greasy fingerprints.
The FXAA impact on alpha textures within the game seemed to blur these more than improve quality even though it did crisp up the polygon objects within the game. As a compromise for cards that are not able to run MSAA, we found that running FXAA on low provided some of the anti-aliasing benefits without reducing the rest of the image quality within game that we observed with higher levels of FXAA.
The implementation of MSAA within the game is very straight forward and significantly improves upon the edges of polygon objects at the expense of a good bit of performance. We just wish 8X MSAA was also supported.
We also spent some time looking at the use of SSAA within the game to see if it could offer image quality enhancements that could improve the alpha quality textures within the game as well as bring the benefits of MSAA without the smudged look of FXAA. Overall, when SSAA was set to its maximum value, the alpha textures as well as all other textures within the game looked absolutely fantastic compared to the baseline of no anti-aliasing enabled.
We did observe that the use of SSAA did not do a great job with polygon object anti-aliasing, thus it is not a direct replacement of the use of MSAA. Unfortunately, the performance impact of SSAA being enabled to a high enough level that it is readily apparent during game play simply doesn’t seem to be possible in a single card configuration even at 1920x1080.
The Bottom Line
Battlefield 4 brings the franchise forward yet another step with improved visuals and a more in-depth level of experience compared to its predecessor thanks to the updated Frostbite 3 engine. It also gives us something to look forward to with the impending launch of the Mantle API which is promising a significant performance boost above what DirectX 11 is capable of providing. Meanwhile, we will continue sharpening our skills in the multiplayer arena and enjoying the fantastic gaming experience that it provides.
If you are looking towards the perfect video card for this game right now, it seems AMD video cards do have the advantage under Windows 8.1. We experienced overall smoother performance, especially during the performance drops or dips that happened from explosions, debris, or lots of smoke.
At 1080p the AMD Radeon R9 280X at $299 offers a great price versus performance value for BF4. It even has the power to push it to 2560x1600 if you are willing to trade off some image fidelity. If you are looking toward high-end gaming our recommendation is the AMD Radeon R9 290. At its price of $399 it offers a great value for 2560x1600 gaming. If you are looking for the most affordable video card, that packs the most punch, the Radeon R9 270X at $229 is the best deal, beating out the price of the GTX 760.
(Kyle’s Note: Let’s address the elephant in the room; the lack of the GeForce GTX 780 Ti which we fully reviewed here and here over the last ten days. Yes, we would have very much liked to have included the GTX 780 TI in this article but resources and logistics kept us from that. That said, given the results we saw at 2560x1600 among the high-end card set, we highly doubt that the conclusions we reached would have changed at all considering the much less expensive Radeon R8 290 is our suggested card for BF4 at 2560x1600 resolution.
We have spent a lot of time with BF4 simply learning how to properly test for our readers. We will continue to test BF4 in a multi-player only environment because we understand that is how the huge majority of our readers will be using it. BF4 is being included in our regular testing suite so you will see a lot of coverage going forward. Surely you will see the GTX 780 Ti and BF4 testing here on [H]ard|OCP soon, both at multi-display resolutions and in multi-GPU configurations. We also have some specialty articles focused around BF4 that we will be publishing as well. So stay tuned on that front.)
