Battlefield 2 benchmarked

SUCCESSOR to the hugely popular Battlefield 1942, the game Battlefield 2, developed by Digital Illusions in Sweden and distributed by Electronic Arts, will be released later this month.

Battlefield 2, a multiplayer first person shooter combined with vehicular combat and squad-based tactics looks likely to be as popular as its multi-million selling predecessors, but will you need to buy a new PC to play it?

The INQUIRER has been testing the demo version of the game with a various hardware configurations. These include a high-end system and a low-end system, the latter designed to emulate the average legacy PC purchased two to four years ago. Here are some preliminary results from these tests. Note that the tests used Fraps to measure frames per second while playing back the same recorded demo on all systems - something that wasn't possible with earlier games in the Battlefield series.

You can play this game on a low end system, however it will look far better on a more powerful PC. We first tested the game with a GeForce 5700LE graphics card on a 2GHz Pentium 4 system with 1GB of memory. This is close to the minimum required system specifications for Battlefield 2. At low resolutions (1024x768), with most of the DirectX 9 effects turned off, the game ran well. However, with these settings, the graphical glory was sadly diminished.

At these low quality settings, the visuals were actually very similar to those of an earlier game in the Battlefield series, Battlefield Vietnam, which was released over a year ago. With graphical eye candy enabled on the 5700LE, performance slumped to under 20 frames per second, well below the 30 to 40 FPS necessary for playability. Some of the effects, such as dynamic shadows, simply didn't work on the 5700LE. Nvidia's new budget chip, the GeForce 6200, produced slightly better results, but still struggled to show the game in all its magnificence.

On a high end system, we saw much better results. This Biostar 330P SFF PC is based around the Nvidia Nforce 4 chipset, and contains an AMD Athlon 64 CPU and 1GB of memory. An ATI X700 Pro graphics card made it obvious that this is a game written for DirectX 9 hardware. The X700 Pro was capable of running Battlefield 2 anti-aliased at high resolutions (1280x960) with most effects at their highest settings. Despite having only 128 MB of memory, the card was able to handle the game fine at its medium texture details setting. However, high detail textures were too much for it, leading to severe drop outs in frame rate when textures needed to be shifted from main memory. Informal tests showed that a 128MB Geforce 6600 card delivered similar results to the X700Pro.

Some explanation of the graphs: Generally the tests were conducted with the global graphics quality setting in Battlefield 2 set to either low, medium or high. The setting used is stated on the graph. In all cases, however, view distance was increased to 100 percent. Anti-aliasing was not used, except on a couple of high end tests, as noted on the graph. Frames per second were averaged at one second intervals during the course of the two minute long recorded demo. Pay particular attention to the the lower frame rates recorded on the Fraps graph - FPS falling below about 30 makes the game noticeably harder to play.

We will update this article soon with further tests of the game on more powerful hardware, including GeForce 6800 GT cards in SLI mode. µ