Introduction

Late last week Digital Illusions (DICE) and EA released a 550MB demo for their upcoming shooter Battlefield 2, giving gamers a brief glimpse of what the final game will be like when it’s released next week.

In case you didn’t know, Battlefield 2 is the sequel to the hit first-person shooter Battlefield 1942, only it’s set in a modern combat environment. In the game you can play as the US, Chinese, or the Middle East Coalition. Battlefield 2 is built on an entirely new game engine with both single-player and multi-player modes, but as in BF1942, you’ll likely want to play multi. Up to 64 players can join a server with, according to EA, “maps that scale to the number of players engaging in battle for a unique and intense experience every time.”

Like BF1942, with BF2 you can hop in vehicles ranging from tanks, armored personnel carriers, and trucks, to helicopters and jets, with 30 vehicles available at your disposal. BF2 also includes a wide range of small-arms weaponry, including pistols, sub-machine guns, and assault rifles, as well as fragmentation grenades, C4, and missiles. The vehicles and weapons aren’t straight out of some programmer’s head either, they’re all real-world weapons in use by militaries around the world (with the exception of the Joint Strike Fighter and SU-34, neither of which has officially entered service yet).

You can man helicopters in BF2

Gunfight near base

M1 versus T90

If you played the Desert Combat mod for Battlefield 1942, you’ll likely feel right at home in Battlefield 2, as the game feels the same in many ways. DICE has added new classes and a new experience system with stats, but fundamentally the concept is largely the same, only with a few tweaks here and there, and of course better graphics.

Compatibility

Whenever a new game comes out there are always concerns of bugs and compatibility issues with certain hardware, Battlefield 2 appears to be no exception. Already there are numerous reports of problems with the multiplayer browser, which can lock up and performs sluggishly. Considering BF2’s emphasis on multi-player, this is an issue that EA/DICE should definitely look into for the game’s retail release next week. Some ATI users have also reported problems with BF2, but we didn’t encounter any issues during our testing with CATALYST 5.6 other than a few flashing textures at 2048x1536 with the X850 XT Platinum Edition, NVIDIA users are encouraged in the demo to use beta drivers, ForceWare 77.30, these are actually newer than the beta drivers NVIDIA provides on nZone!

Advancing to base

That Cobra is about to get owned

BAM

Fortunately we can report that we didn’t run into a single issue with the GeForce 6800 GT or Ultra when running 77.30.

With the system’s set up we were eager to see how the ATI and NVIDIA cards performed, but first let’s take a look at image quality…