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3D Performance with Battlefield 2142 Beta: Part 1 High-end Cards September 08, 2006 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: In today's article, we've gathered together the latest $300+ high-end cards from ATI and NVIDIA, as well as a few high-end cards from yesteryear such as the GeForce 7800 GTX and Radeon X1800 XT 512MB. Other topics discussed include 256MB vs 512MB benchmarks, and single-card as well as dual-card configs. Do two GeForce 6800 GS cards add up to one 7900 GT? Find out in this article!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 7 ) |
Because of this, whenever a new, highly anticipated game comes out, we like to take a closer look at its performance, testing it out with a wide range of hardware so that you, the reader, can better gauge what kind of performance you could expect from a new hardware upgrade. “Is more memory really useful?” “How does x component compare to y?” These are the types of questions we hope to answer in these articles.
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Without a doubt, the hot title that’s going to be released later this year is EA/DICE’s Battlefield 2142. With Unreal Tournament 2007 set to debut in 2007, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars pushed back into 2007, and Call of Duty 3 exclusive to the console market, Battlefield 2142 is really the only AAA first-person shooter that’s left for debut this fall (F.E.A.R. Extraction Point, an expansion pack for F.E.A.R. will no doubt also be a popular release, but its focus is single-player gameplay).
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Battlefield 2142 builds on the highly successful Battlefield series, setting place over 100 years in the future. A new ice age has begun, and the planet is low on resources. As a result, all-out war has broken out, with two superpowers vying for control of those limited resources. Like previous titles in the Battlefield series, you can control vehicles and aircraft, while grunts and special forces units have access to a wide variety of handheld weaponry.
The technology
Rather than start from scratch with a brand new game engine, for Battlefield 2142 DICE has taken the now proven game engine from Battlefield 2 and implemented tweaks and enhancements to go with the game’s new futuristic look and feel. DICE has integrated new animations and shaders that don’t take as long to load, as well as integrating new atmospheric effects (such as the snow that falls in the beta demo’s Verdun map) giving the game a more immersive feel than its predecessor. DICE has also cranked up the game’s textures – higher resolution textures are everywhere once the eye candy is cranked up.
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The end result is that Battlefield 2142 should play fairly well with existing hardware, and while frame rates are lower when the game’s “high” quality settings are used, you’re definitely getting better visuals as a result.
The multiplayer beta is limited to one level, Verdun, which is a map that features the game’s new Titan mode, where opposing teams try to take control of the other teams Titan, which is basically a massive flying gunship, all while also defending their own Titan.
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Compatibility
While testing with the beta we consistently noticed flashing textures with GeForce 6 series hardware as well as Radeon X1800/X1900 in the same area. Fortunately it was limited to a small area and the textures would only flash from a distance, once you got closer the problem went away, other than that we didn’t encounter any showstoppers, although we did have to force SLI as well as CrossFire support via the driver control panel, performance didn’t scale appropriately until we did this. For ATI owners this is accomplished by adjusting the Catalyst A.I. slider from “standard” to “advanced”, which forces ATI’s AFR rendering mode for D3D apps, while NVIDIA’s alternative frame rendering 1 mode gave the best performance for SLI usage. We tested performance by using the same method we use for Battlefield 2 and Oblivion, with FRAPS.
We simply hopped on an empty server, selected a spawn point that was close to the area we conducted our benchmarking, and proceeded to use FRAPS to record frame rate. We kept our results as repeatable as possible by walking down the same group of tank tracks, and stuck to an area of the Verdun map that’s a little more demanding than other areas.
| Test Systems | Page:: ( 2 / 7 ) |
System Setup
Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800
ASUS P5N32-SLI SE Deluxe (for NVIDIA systems)
ASUS P5W DH Deluxe (for ATI systems)
2GB Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4
ATI Radeon X1950 XTX
ATI Radeon X1900 XTX
ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB
ATI Radeon X1900 XT 256MB
ATI Radeon X1800 XT 512MB
Catalyst 6.8
BFG GeForce 7950 GX2
NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX
NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GS
Driver version ForceWare 91.47
250GB Maxtor Hard Drive Maxline III SATA Hard Drive w/16MB Cache
Windows XP Professional SP2
DirectX 9.0c
Benchmarks
Battlefield 2142 Multiplayer demo
Notes
We’re continuing to test with adaptive/transparency AA turned on, for these tests we also set NVIDIA’s image quality setting from the default “quality” setting to “high quality”, which disables most of NVIDIA’s AF optimizations. We tested Battlefield 2142 running the game’s high quality mode, all sliders were cranked to the high quality setting.
| 512MB vs. 256MB | Page:: ( 3 / 7 ) |
Battlefield 2142 – Direct3D
| Battlefield 2142 Performance 1600x1200 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 7900 GT 512MB | 34 | 43 |
| GeForce 7900 GT 256MB | 32 | 42 |
| Radeon X1900 XT 512MB | 39 | 57 |
| Radeon X1900 XT 256MB | 37 | 53 |
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| Battlefield 2142 Performance 1920x1440 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 7900 GT 512MB | 25 | 32 |
| GeForce 7900 GT 256MB | 23 | 30 |
| Radeon X1900 XT 512MB | 30 | 42 |
| Radeon X1900 XT 256MB | 17 | 39 |
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Notes
In order to test the impact video memory size has on performance, we underclocked a GeForce 7900 GTX board to GeForce 7900 GT levels. It’s not quite the same as having a real GeForce 7900 GT 512MB, but it’s close. We also ran benchmarks with ATI’s recently released Radeon X1900 XT 256MB, comparing it to a 512MB XT board. Keep in mind that these ATI cards were tested on the P5N32-SLI SE platform, although performance of the 512MB XT board is pretty similar to the numbers we saw with the P5W DH Deluxe.
| BF 2142 4xAA/16xAF | Page:: ( 4 / 7 ) |
Battlefield 2142 – Direct3D
| Battlefield 2142 Performance 1600x1200 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 7950 GX2 | 57 | 68 |
| GeForce 7900 GTX | 45 | 57 |
| GeForce 7900 GT | 32 | 42 |
| GeForce 7800 GTX | 31 | 40 |
| GeForce 6800 GS | 15 | 22 |
| Radeon X1950 XTX | 45 | 64 |
| Radeon X1900 XTX | 42 | 60 |
| Radeon X1900 XT 512MB | 39 | 57 |
| Radeon X1800 XT 512MB | 38 | 52 |
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| Battlefield 2142 Performance 1920x1440 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 7950 GX2 | 42 | 50 |
| GeForce 7900 GTX | 34 | 43 |
| GeForce 7900 GT | 23 | 30 |
| GeForce 7800 GTX | 20 | 29 |
| GeForce 6800 GS | 11 | 15 |
| Radeon X1950 XTX | 34 | 49 |
| Radeon X1900 XTX | 31 | 44 |
| Radeon X1900 XT 512MB | 30 | 42 |
| Radeon X1800 XT 512MB | 28 | 39 |
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| SLI vs CrossFire | Page:: ( 5 / 7 ) |
Battlefield 2142 – Direct3D
| Battlefield 2142 Performance 1600x1200 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| 1xGeForce 7900 GT Baseline | 32 | 42 |
| GeForce 7900 GTX SLI | 70 | 85 |
| GeForce 7900 GT SLI | 49 | 66 |
| GeForce 6800 GS SLI | 28 | 39 |
| Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire | 77 | 111 |
| Radeon X1900 XTX CrossFire | 68 | 100 |
| Radeon X1800 XT 512MB CrossFire | 64 | 90 |
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| Battlefield 2142 Performance 1920x1440 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| 1xGeForce 7900 GT Baseline | 23 | 30 |
| GeForce 7900 GTX SLI | 52 | 62 |
| GeForce 7900 GT SLI | 36 | 47 |
| GeForce 6800 GS SLI | 19 | 27 |
| Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire | 60 | 87 |
| Radeon X1900 XTX CrossFire | 52 | 77 |
| Radeon X1800 XT 512MB CrossFire | 42 | 60 |
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| 8xAA Performance | Page:: ( 6 / 7 ) |
Battlefield 2142 – Direct3D
| Battlefield 2142 Performance 1600x1200 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 7900 GTX SLI | 45 | 57 |
| GeForce 7900 GT SLI | 30 | 42 |
| Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire | 44 | 66 |
| Radeon X1900 XTX CrossFire | 39 | 60 |
| Radeon X1800 XT 512MB CrossFire | 37 | 54 |
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| Battlefield 2142 Performance 1920x1440 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 7900 GTX SLI | 34 | 43 |
| GeForce 7900 GT SLI | 20 | 28 |
| Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire | 33 | 51 |
| Radeon X1900 XTX CrossFire | 29 | 44 |
| Radeon X1800 XT 512MB CrossFire | 26 | 40 |
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| Conclusion | Page:: ( 7 / 7 ) |
Looking over the 256MB vs 512MB benchmarks, it appears the ATI cards benefit from the extra memory more so than the GeForce cards. This is probably due in part because the X1900 XT seems to run a little faster than the GeForce 7900 GT in Battlefield 2142 (and thus the X1900 XT 256MB GPU finds itself memory-bound to a greater extent than the 7900 GT), if a 256MB GeForce 7900 GTX existed we wouldn’t be surprised if the margins for the NVIDIA cards were a little greater in this test scenario. At 1280x1024 the 7900 GT 256MB trails the 512MB card by just 2%, this then opens to 4% at 1600x1200 and ultimately nearly 30% by the time we get to 2048x1536, where the higher resolution really pushes the card’s memory subsystem. Meanwhile, the Radeon X1900 XT 512MB runs 7% faster than the 256MB card at 1280x1024 and 1600x1200, before finally opening up to 29% by 2048x1536. What lesson can we learn from this? If you can afford to do it, it may not be a bad idea to splurge for the 512MB card, particularly if you plan on running at resolutions of 1920x1200/1440 or greater, especially if you had your eye on the X1900 GPU. The GeForce 7900 GT 256MB should probably be enough to suffice for anyone but the gamer who plans on running at 2048x1536 or greater, and chance are that user is probably running something faster like a 7900 GTX or X1900 XTX, both are only offered with 512MB of memory.
Looking over the baseline 4xAA/16xAF numbers, the GeForce 7950 GX2 comes out on top in terms of single-card performance, although its margin of victory isn’t as great as you’d expect, particularly at higher resolutions. We believe this is because SLI currently isn’t as scaling as well as it normally does in BF2142, but more on this later. It’s a tight race between the GeForce 7900 GTX and the Radeon X1950 XTX, but ultimately the XTX board comes out ahead, particularly as you increase the screen resolution. The 7900 GTX and X1950 XTX go from a tie at 1280x1024 to the X1950 XTX taking a 9% lead by 2048x1536. Meanwhile, the 7900 GTX and Radeon X1900 XTX are locked in a virtual tie across the board. The GeForce 7900 GT isn’t able to keep up with the other high-end cards, we were honestly a little surprised to see it falling so far behind the 7900 GTX so we went back and re-ran our results but came to similar findings. If it weren’t for the 256MB vs 512MB benchmarks on page 3 we’d chalk it up as a frame buffer i.e. memory size issue, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. We honestly just don’t know why the GT falls so far behind the GTX, it’s probably a combination of the 200MHz clock speed deficiency, mixed with the slower memory speed (140MHz slower) and its smaller frame buffer. We also noted that the GeForce 6800 GS delivers roughly half the performance of a GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB.
When it comes to SLI versus CrossFire, CrossFire currently comes out ahead in Battlefield 2142 performance. Based on our tests, we have a strong feeling part of the reason why CrossFire put up such a strong showing in these tests in particular is because CrossFire was scaling a little better than SLI was in the Battlefield 2142 beta. In previous dual-GPU testing, we’ve found that enabling CrossFire and SLI typically yields just shy of a doubling in performance – it’s usually a performance increase of 1.7x-1.9x, but not quite 2x. We included GeForce 7900 GT baseline scores so you could see that NVIDIA’s SLI isn’t delivering anywhere close to these ratios, particularly as you increase the screen resolution. By the time we hit 2048x1536, the performance increase from going from one 7900 GT card to two boards running in SLI was just 22%, that’s a long way from a doubling in performance! Keep in mind, as we mentioned in the intro, we had to force AFR mode to get SLI to scale at all with Battlefield 2142 beta, so its quite possible that the AFR mode we selected isn’t quite ideal for BF2142 and more driver work will be needed on NVIDIA’s part to get SLI to scale more appropriately. That’s what it looks like to us at least (it would also explain the lower than expected performance of GeForce 7950 GX2 at higher resolutions). We also see the X1950 XTX begin to pull away from the X1900 XTX a little more than in single-card config thanks to its GDD4 memory.
Finally, there’s the 8xAA numbers. As you can see, we got fairly playable performance up to about 1600x1200, beyond that things began to get sluggish. Here we also see the X1950 XTX continuing to deliver a nice performance improvement over the X1900 XTX.
In closing, we'd like to remind you that we are testing with beta software. In other words, performance can and probably will change somewhat by the time the final game is released. EB is currently listing the ETA for BF 2142 as an October release though so the game is definitely almost done.
So that’s it for our high-end testing with Battlefield 2142. Stay tuned for tests with more hardware combinations next week!