Battlefield: Bad Company 2

The latest game in the Battlefield series - Bad Company 2 - is another one of our new DX11 games and has been a smash hit at retail. It’s also surprisingly hard on our GPUs, enough so that we can say we found something that’s more demanding than Crysis. As BC2 doesn’t have a built-in benchmark or recording mode, here we take a FRAPS run of the jeep chase in the first act, which as an on-rails portion of the game provides very consistent results and a spectacle of explosions, trees, and more.

At 1680 and without anti-aliasing, Bad Company 2 provides for a smooth gameplay experience across our entire range of cards. Unfortunately for NVIDIA this is a game AMD traditionally does well in, so the GTS 450 isn’t particularly competitive; it can only match wits with the 5750. Even with a hefty overclock, the 5770 still manages to edge everything out here. Based on these results and our previous GTX 460 results, it looks like we’re shader limited for the most part, in which case a “full” GF106 card wouldn’t do noticeably better here.

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  • just4U - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link

    overclockers is the only review I've seen that shows the 250 in the mix and by the looks of it the 450 is a good 25-30% faster then the 250 on most games they tested with... what reviews are you reading?

    Personally I see no reason to rush out and buy two of these. A 460 is cheaper and to close in performance to justify it.
  • marraco - Tuesday, September 14, 2010 - link

    http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gts-45...
  • KG Bird - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link

    Nice review, but answer one question for me. Why does the HD 5770 scale well in crossfire while others like the HD 5870 don't?
  • heflys - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link

    That's one of the great mysteries that has plagued the Crossfire setup. Might just be crappy drivers. Who knows.....
  • Jedi2155 - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link

    Do it right...and do it right the first time is the name of the game.
  • OCNewbie - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link

    Why would they compare a GTS 450 overclocked to a stock 5770? Wouldn't it make more sense to compare apples to apples, or in this case, OC'd versus OC'd? If you're gonna OC the GTS 450, then wouldn't it be reasonable to expect you'd also OC the 5770? Doesn't the 5770 OC quite well? This is probably even less of a debate, as far as which is the best performer, if you factor in OC'ng to BOTH cards.
  • jabber - Tuesday, September 14, 2010 - link

    Most 5770 cards go up to 900/1300 pretty easy.

    Would leave the 450 even further in the dust however.
  • Belard - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link

    Looks like AMD still has a solid product line of DX11 parts. So an end-user would still be looking at the older 210~250 cards for the $40~80 market.

    AMD could still easily reduce their prices across the board... but guess they're going to wait until the 6000 series ships and them blow out the 5000 series for cheap.

    If the 6750 comes out at $120, but good deal faster than the 5770, that is going to hurt.
  • KingKuei - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link

    So what happened to the Release 260 drivers we were supposed to get this morning?

    Anand mentioned something about a bug in the driver related to OpenGL (or was it CUDA?) that they were going to fix before releasing it. Yet it's already late afternoon Monday and there's nothing on nVidia's site yet.

    The big deal for me actually is related to SC2. SUPPOSEDLY, this is the driver release that fixes many of the issues related to framerate drops in SC2. I care more about that than the GTS 450!
  • Spazweasel - Tuesday, September 14, 2010 - link

    One thing to note: there is a low-profile (double slot) version of this card already available from Palit. I can't find a low-profile 5770. For low-profile cases, this is therefore likely the best you can currently get, and given it's a low-thermal-impact part, this makes sense.

    The ball is in your court, Powercolor/Sparkle!

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