[H] Battlefield 3 Open Beta Performance and Image Quality

[imaheadcase]

HardOCP is not bias, they just are TERRIBLE testers. Everyone knows how Kyle has the "I"m holy and better than other people because my tests are realworld".

They don't do tests like others.

But he is right, they "reviews" they do are different that other sites, just because Kyle is a douche bag.

But all these points are moot, because this is not the final game, Nvidia and ATI will have new drivers out by then, and EA will have a huge patch out on launch day. The point is, both high end cards will perform very well. I'm glad i bought my GTX580 for BF3.

 

[The Ultimate]

Kyle may be is Steve Job's distant cousing xD

 

[skipsneeky2]

Hands everyone a beer so we can all chill.

Now back to brass knuckles,4 pages of this arguement is enough to give the readers a headache.

Could BF3 be caching the ram sorta like windows 7 does?

Have a hard time believing this consumes so much vram and i guess any smart shopper still wants a 2gb amd card cause this is the biggest sh*t pickle i've seen in anandtech yet.

While my post obviously prob won't help to the cause of who's card is beast , me as in also alot of others are taking headache pills over such a simple thing.

 

[GaiaHunter]

They told you why. They said
So the question is why, they went to press with the numbers they did.
They made a choice.
Imo, one that would be controversial and if AMD cards were on top 50% of the time, they went with who butters the bread the most (advertising).
All without losing any integrity, because of the said inconsistency.

Funny my gtx460 overclocked beats the crap out of both these cards @ 1600x1200//high settings even. ?

I'm starting to think all the performance numbers are not very accurate.
I guess it would depend on exactly where and how long you run your bench for.

The question notty is why should we give more credit to the other numbers instead of [H]? After all, all the reviewers will have the same problem concerning this game.

I think that is more accurate than believing [H] is biased happy.

 

[notty22]

The question notty is why should we give more credit to the other numbers instead of [H] - after all, all the reviewers will have the same problem.

I think that is more accurate than believe [H] is biased happy.

I'm doing my best in the couple posts I have in this thread, to not debate Hocp. We are still discussing a unfinished game beta. Where every site may have tested a different section. And even then, the results are all not that far apart.

Other than, imo, the game is visually underwhelming for the fps its delivering. Yet every promotion movie I see, looks much better than the game I've played so far.

 

[SirPauly]

Hands everyone a beer so we can all chill.

Now back to brass knuckles,4 pages of this arguement is enough to give the readers a headache.

Could BF3 be caching the ram sorta like windows 7 does?

Have a hard time believing this consumes so much vram and i guess any smart shopper still wants a 2gb amd card cause this is the biggest sh*t pickle i've seen in anandtech yet.

While my post obviously prob won't help to the cause of who's card is beast , me as in also alot of others are taking headache pills over such a simple thing.

What has me puzzled, is, there was an apples-to-apples testing with two sku's that did have the same amount of ram, and AMD offered more noticeable performance in their testing as well.

The first thought by some when seeing the benches and the tone of earlier posters, was the ram differential, and why AMD clearly had the advantage, but this doesn't seem to be the case, so, why does AMD have a clear advantage?

CPU?

Platform specific?

Area tested?

 

[TheAdvocate]

From what we've seen so far it looks like appropriate cards for BF3 from what is currently on the market are :

1680x1050 - GTX 560 / 6950 1GB / 6870
1920x1080 & 1920x1200 - 6950 2GB / 6970 / GTX 570
2560x1600 - 580 SLI / 6970 CF / GTX 590 / 6990

That looks about right to me. You might be able to get by with a 2GB Ti @ 1080p, but we'd need some benchs.

 

[SirPauly]

That theory only works if one can prove memory limitations.

 

[skipsneeky2]

What has me puzzled, is, there was an apples-to-apples testing with two sku's that did have the same amount of ram, and AMD offered more noticeable performance in their testing as well.

The first thought by some when seeing the benches and the tone of earlier posters, was the ram differential, and why AMD clearly had the advantage, but this doesn't seem to be the case, so, why does AMD have a clear advantage?

CPU?

Platform specific?

Area tested?

Think to end this huge flamewar between the two parties...we need to test using 2gb gtx560ti cards....2.5gb gtx570 and 3gb gtx580....after that we can compare each in their own class of performance then declare a winner.

Till then we could still argue if 1gb nvidia cards still outclass 2gb amd cards or is it the other way around ?

While my idea isn't original by any means i have yet to see a full performance review by a respectable site showing such cards compared.

Might get flamed for this one but we are comparing apples and oranges till those respectable sites give us such a review.

Edit:I know a 3gb gtx580 vs 2gb 6970 is unfair,but if the game can use more then 2gb,then that game is a real pig and there's bigger problems

 

[SirPauly]

In HardOCP's testing, everything that was AMD outclassed nVidia, from a performance point-of-view but more importantly, a performance per dollar point of view. A 15 percent differential is outclassed to me, never mind bringing in the value.

 

[notty22]

What has me puzzled, is, there was an apples-to-apples testing with two sku's that did have the same amount of ram, and AMD offered more noticeable performance in their testing as well.

The first thought by some when seeing the benches and the tone of earlier posters, was the ram differential, and why AMD clearly had the advantage, but this doesn't seem to be the case, so, why does AMD have a clear advantage?

CPU?

Platform specific?

Area tested?

What clear advantage ?
Have you played the game on a PC ? I can tell you that my experience is similar to the high FPS I get in Dirt 3 or AVP, with SLI performing (visually and scaling) well. The only difference is I can't go in leave everything on Ultra. I have to adjust a couple of settings. HBAO off definitely. Then either lower the MSAA available or lower one of the texture settings. This is on the first driver on the beta.
Higher fps than what I could get in DA2 or Witcher2.
Even the bottom line comment at Hocp

The Bottom Line


Performance in the Battlefield 3 public beta inconsistent. The multiplayer nature of the beta made it impractical to objectively compare performance between video cards, but we did see some relatively repetitive behavior among video card brands. In general, we had better performance using video cards equipped with AMD GPUs than we did with NVIDIA GPUs. We downloaded the newest beta drivers from both GPU makers specifically released for this game. We tested each video card thoroughly, and the results with AMD video cards were faster, but not by much in this open beta.

 

[skipsneeky2]

Thank you Ea for bringing us another Crysis .

After playing so many lousy console ports and at 1080p on a 4 year old mid range video with no problems, now we have a game that grabs any video card set up by the balls.

And the first in its class to require at bare minimum a gtx560ti for 1080p me i'm happy cause alot of games simply bored the higher end cards.

Kudos for running the video card market rampant with sales and thank you for making most gamer's care about graphics over gameplay....

 

[houe]

Think to end this huge flamewar between the two parties...we need to test using 2gb gtx560ti cards....2.5gb gtx570 and 3gb gtx580....after that we can compare each in their own class of performance then declare a winner.

Till then we could still argue if 1gb nvidia cards still outclass 2gb amd cards or is it the other way around ?

While my idea isn't original by any means i have yet to see a full performance review by a respectable site showing such cards compared.

Might get flamed for this one but we are comparing apples and oranges till those respectable sites give us such a review.

Edit:I know a 3gb gtx580 vs 2gb 6970 is unfair,but if the game can use more then 2gb,then that game is a real pig and there's bigger problems

I mostly agree and have been saying the same thing. Really we need a review that includes all the cards in all available memory configurations (560, 570, 580, 590, 6950, 6970, 6990). But I am more interested in 3 monitor configuration resolution personally I doubt we are going to see what we really want because who is going to have that much hardware?!? Having said that I picked up a 3GB 580 and it should arrive on Thursday. If all looks good I'll pick up a 2nd for surround. Probably the worst value but no one ever said running 3 monitors would be cheap. I saw someone on wide screen gaming forum say he was using 2.5GB with 3 screens (2560x1600). Not sure if its true or not, but I didn't want to take the chance I guess.

 

[SirPauly]

What clear advantage ?

Around a 15 percent differential, with much cheaper price-points.

 

[AnandThenMan]

I wish someone would just test a 1GB 6950 against a 2GB 6950 for we can end this bickering.

End? Na, there would just be a whole new round of bickering. :\ :sneaky:

Intel + AMD + Nvidia please poop out your next generation products. Looks like my i5 2500K + 470 may hit a wall with this title.

AMD seems to be constipated at the moment. :'(

BTW, I don't agree with the argument that this beta has no bearing or relevance to what will ship as the final game. They are not going to pull a Half Life2 and toss out all the game code, what you have now is at least somewhat representative of what will be the shipping code.

 

[skipsneeky2]

I mostly agree and have been saying the same thing. Really we need a review that includes all the cards in all available memory configurations (560, 570, 580, 590, 6950, 6970, 6990). But I am more interested in 3 monitor configuration resolution personally I doubt we are going to see what we really want because who is going to have that much hardware?!? Having said that I picked up a 3GB 580 and it should arrive on Thursday. If all looks good I'll pick up a 2nd for surround. Probably the worst value but no one ever said running 3 monitors would be cheap. I saw someone on wide screen gaming forum say he was using 2.5GB with 3 screens (2560x1600). Not sure if its true or not, but I didn't want to take the chance I guess.

If you could be so kind as to give us some high 1920x1080 and ultra 1920x1080 numbers that would be nice of you Single display of course i'm not as rich as you

Appears a 2gb 6970 could be in my future but a 3gb gtx580 has crossed my mind.

Would be happy playing 1920x1080 on high with no aa of any kind just like i do in BC2 .

I don't care how pretty that bush over there /\is in ultra while some camping f*ck is blasting me from over in that bush>>

Only good thing about Ultra is how much money you can throw at it,i'm not legally blind there isn't worlds difference for me to say oh yeah i need dual gtx580s for that i know when to quit :thumbsup:

 

[edplayer]

I just ran the beta @ 1080p max settings 4xaa and used 981 mb of memory max.
I used cpuz.

Then I hooked up the old monitor @ 1600x1200, same settings , guess what? it used 980mb of memory .
Also using gpuz.

Hmm, I've been running at 1920x1080 and the video settings at the default medium choices (medium post processing AA and SSAO, I believe. Someone correct this if it is wrong) since the beta started and I'm always reading around 920MB of vram use using Afterburner.

 

[7earitup]

I have seen similar results in regards to VRAM usage. My GTX 260 216 has 896 MB of VRAM and BF3 on all low settings eats up ~780 of it @ 1920x1200.

 

[imaheadcase]

This is no were near Crysis level graphics, i play on high settings at 1900x1200 on GTX460 just fine and its always high 30s 40s outside with fraps and 50ish jumps to inside metro.

But again, EA is putting out a huge patch at launch so it can change.

The best bang for buck is Quad core CPU if you want to get technical.

 

[RobertR1]

Just make sure once you adjust your game settings to match hardocp's that you quit the game and restart it. The changes don't take effect on the fly, you need to exit out and rejoin another game.

I tried it myself with a single overclocked 480 and was getting less than he did, but I was trying to run it with AA and everything was on Ultra. My results were more inline with the techspot benches at the same settings; low 20s outdoors, it wasn't playable to say the least. :\

If I just hit F11 (to benchmark) in the free version of FRAPS and play for 7mins, that'll mimic what HardOcp did?

 

[Silverforce11]

If you guys think its using whatever VRAM you have and scales accordingly, then 1gb vram users would have low-res textures applied based on a LoD setting, and may well have low poly models/terrain as well, or AA is not applied based on LoD. It's a deferred rendering engine, it can do that quite easily.

So 1GB vram may be fine to play at 1080p with 4xAA, but it scales down the graphics.

That is the only logical explanation.

 

[tviceman]

If you guys think its using whatever VRAM you have and scales accordingly, then 1gb vram users would have low-res textures applied based on a LoD setting, and may well have low poly models/terrain as well, or AA is not applied based on LoD. It's a deferred rendering engine, it can do that quite easily.

So 1GB vram may be fine to play at 1080p with 4xAA, but it scales down the graphics.

That is the only logical explanation.

I don't think the game is going to scale the graphics down if/when you manually tell it to run at certain graphical settings. Your explanation is, in fact, illogical.

 

[The Ultimate]

I don't think the game is going to scale the graphics down if/when you manually tell it to run at certain graphical settings. Your explanation is, in fact, illogical.

Rage does that. . .

 

[Silverforce11]

It scales it based on distance and FoV. There is no LoD setting you can change.

Whats your take then? Why is it appearing to be using more vram the more you available, and less if you don't have it?

 

[badb0y]

I don't think the game is going to scale the graphics down if/when you manually tell it to run at certain graphical settings. Your explanation is, in fact, illogical.

What other explanation can there be? It seems like the only logical one.