[H] Battlefield 4 Video Card Performance and IQ Review

[Pandora's Box]

I bet they have more rigs than just two.

Oh... and they probably can afford another bf4 key.

actually yeah, i was thinking of commander mode for some reason, spectator allows up to 4.

 

[Vesku]

I think the overall experience HardOCP has with cards while playing games is useful information. I'd like to see them test with multiple configurations connected at the same time running in the same squad, however if they observe Nvidia cards having a bit more trouble in BF4 than AMD cards I have no reason to think they are lying. Just as I didn't presume they were lying when they said Nvidia multi-gpu was a better experience only a few months ago.

 

[Will Robinson]

+1 Well put.

 

[3DVagabond]

I liked the idea of joining as a first person observer. Seems to make the most sense. Although, would CPU usage vary in that circumstance?

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Linus got talked into benching MP for BF3, after numerous tries to simulate the exact same run through the results were basically exactly the same as in SP.

The reason MP is harder to run is cpu related, not gpu.

 

[blackened23]

Linus got talked into benching MP for BF3, after numerous tries to simulate the exact same run through the results were basically exactly the same as in SP.

The reason MP is harder to run is cpu related, not gpu.

GPU makes a large difference in MP BF4, of this there is no doubt. I've used a few GPUs in BF3 and the only thing I ever did was multiplayer - there were large difference in games performance related to the GPU. You make it sound like GPU doesn't matter which clearly isn't the case. The major difference with MP testing is that there are many more "levolution" events and explosions which basically hardly ever happen in single player, so it is completely possible for SP performance to not match MP performance. In fact, on that note, I recall the 7970 being close to the 680 in BF3 single player (even though the 680 won) yet in multiplayer the 7970 was a microstuttering mess with herky jerky framerates - and that was on a single card for testing. This did not happen on the 680 in MP. That was a clear indication of MP performance not matching SP performance.

Basically, the 7970 did fine in single player because there just wasn't a whole lot of crap going on. In multiplayer, though, once tons of people were on the screens with explosions everywhere it tanked. Maybe that was fixed with a later driver, but MP performance was way , way , way different than SP performance. In fact I do remember AMD having some sort of driver update a LONG time ago when I had 7970s to address that - the MP performance was awry in BF3 while SP wasn't. That's why I absolutely think there is value in MP testing, the key here is consistency with lack of variance - that's the hard part of doing such benchmarking.

That said, if you want to say that it's hard to make conclusions from multiplayer testing due to potential variances, I would completely agree with that. That's why IMO small squad testing would be the best, rather than joining a 64 player MP server and crossing your fingers for the best; seeing the 760 beat the 770 in that test benchmark was a real eye opener. You just can't replicate repeated runs in 64 player MP games unless the test conditions are highly controlled. Maybe there's something i'm missing and some way to do this, but I just can't see it.

 

[Xarick]

According to all these charts my not even a year old gtx670 blows serious chunks.
I need to learn not to spend $300+ on video cards. I get burned every time.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

You make it sound like GPU doesn't matter which clearly isn't the case.

Did I make it sound that way? My apologies, that wasn't my intention.

What I meant to say is if you pick a high action bench run with lots of controlled explosions the outcome between MP and SP between graphics cards will remain similar.

Perhaps the fact that in SP just about any modern CPU is good enough, whereas in MP you need something fast, with a decent overclock and seemingly now with BF4 - fast ram was overstated in my previous post.

 

[3DVagabond]

According to all these charts my not even a year old gtx670 blows serious chunks.
I need to learn not to spend $300+ on video cards. I get burned every time.

It's a conspiracy, I tell ya. There's some setting added to new games that's terribly unoptimized on older cards. If you don't want to believe me that's fine!

 

[horza]

..

 

[Will Robinson]

Did I make it sound that way? My apologies, that wasn't my intention.

What I meant to say is if you pick a high action bench run with lots of controlled explosions the outcome between MP and SP between graphics cards will remain similar.

Perhaps the fact that in SP just about any modern CPU is good enough, whereas in MP you need something fast, with a decent overclock and seemingly now with BF4 - fast ram was overstated in my previous post.

But...weren't you just saying in the other thread about the [H] results that multiplayer performance numbers and results aren't similar to the results and ratings of cards benched on single player and therefore may mean that NV cards are actually faster in BF4

 

[mikeyanrol]

 

[skipsneeky2]

Have found Techpowerups BF3 average fps numbers on their gpu reviews pretty useful, i figure half the number is minimum and in my multiplayer experience each resolution tested on the 770 came about there with the numbers from the TPU review as also my minimum theory.

Not sure if TPU will do BF4 but hopefully so soon.