DX11: Battlefield 3

DX11: Battlefield 3

One of the biggest game releases of 2011 was Battlefield 3, a combat immersive game that blew our socks off. We'll take this title and have a look at DX11 performance with the newest graphics cards.

With the plot set in 2014, Sgt Blackburn leads a five-man squad on a mission to locate, find and safely return a US squad investigating a possible chemical weapons site, whose last known position was a market controlled by a hostile militia called the PLR. Blackburn and his squad is later sent to Tehran to apprehend a high-value target named Al-Bashir. While investigating an underground vault in a local bank, Blackburn and his team learn that the PLR had access to Russian portable nuclear devices, and that two of the devices are missing.

All test runs have enabled:

• DX11
• Ultra mode
• 4x MSAA enabled
• 16x AF enabled
• HBAO enabled
• Level: Operation Swordbreaker

BF3 is probably one of the best titles scaling wise. Mind you that I do not have any 7950 CFX 3x results available as with three GPUs the AMD setup kept crashing the game.

We test at Ultra quality mode, should your graphics card have severe issues running in this configuration, by all means select a lower quality level or disable MSAA, 4x MSAA will cost you almost a third to half your framerate. The chart above shows various cards at 1920x1200.

Our Battlefield 3 DirectX 11 benchmark run; here we are in DX11 mode with Ultra settings. This is the Operation Swordbreaker level where there is a good balance between graphics card GPU load and processor utilization, making this an excellent level to test GPU performance in. There will be levels that are a tiny bit more stringent, there will be levels and sections way more easy. We think this level is the best representation of the game engine though.

Kickass multi-GPU scaling for 2-way SLI, but 3-way SLI... well you need to be above 1920x1200 really. A triple monitor setup would make all the difference.

CPU scaling wise we again see noticeable differences, but you have to wonder whether X79 / 3960X is really worth the extra 15 to 20% performance.