Page 21 - Battlefield 2 and 3Dmark 05 and 06
Battlefield 2 - EA
The award-winning Battlefield franchise invades the high tech frontlines of modern warfare in the new sequel, Battlefield 2. The game brings the intensity and excitement of Battlefield 1942 into the modern era with enhanced team play and the latest, most technologically advanced vehicles and weapons systems available to man.
I just love what this game can do in terms of gameplay and image quality. We had to use FRAPS to measure the performance and by use of the game command prompt remove a nasty framerate cap. The results do not lie.
Small note: the game by itself does not support these high resolutions, but simply make a little .bat file and insert the following, save this .bat file in the BF2 game directory and startup at the resolution of your choice:
bf2 +menu 1 +szx 2560 +szy 1600 +fullscreen 1
As you can see the HD 2900 XT handles BF2 quite well. But again we see very similar performance to the more cheaper 8800 GTS 320MB. This is what I told you at the beginning of our benchmark session. The Radeon card wins and loses here and there. What's very tough to comprehend is that the X1950 XTX is faster, but likely again due to the AA issue that AMD is trying to fix.
Again it's time to look at Vista performance. The difference is so small that it's hardly worth mentioning. Very nice.
Synthetic benchmarking: 3DMark 05 & 06 Business Edition
Literally millions and millions benchmark results have been submitted to Futuremarks Online ResultBrowser database. It has become a point of great prestige to be the holder of the highest 3DMark score. A compelling, easy-to-use interface has made 3DMark very popular among game enthusiasts. Futuremarks latest benchmark series, 3DMark03 up-to 3DMark06, continues this tradition by providing a Microsoft DirectX 9 benchmark.
The introduction of DirectX 9 and new hardware shader technologies puts a lot of power in the hands of game developers. Increasingly realistic 3D games will be available over the next year and a half. The use of 3D graphics will become more accessible to other applications areas and even operating systems.
In 3Dmark05 we push a score of 17936 points with the HD2900 XT; which is a new record for a single card. We see a crushing 10768 points for 3DMark06. It really is a nice score, but makes one wonder how reliable the score actually is.
