BattleForge: DX10

Up next is BattleForge, Electronic Arts’ free to play online RTS. As far as RTSes go this game can be quite demanding, and this is without the game’s DX11 features.

With no more than 1fps separating the GTX 570 and GTX 480 at all times, this is as close as a match can come. The 570 and 480 are interchangeable here, driving home the point that the GTX 570 will fill the role of a cooler, quieter, and cheaper GTX 480. Furthermore compared to the GTX 470 we’re now a good 25% ahead, well exceeding the memory bandwidth advantage and approaching the theoretical shader performance advantage.

As for the competition, the Radeon 5870 is no threat to the GTX 570. The only real threat is the SLI/CF cards, which enjoy a notable performance advantage but nothing like what we saw with Crysis.

Crysis: Warhead Metro 2033
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  • Oxford Guy - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link

    Does Nvidia not want people to use Unigine since it showed the 480 beating the pants off the 580 in minimum frame rate at 1920x1200 and lower resolutions?

    I've noticed a definite lack of Unigine on review sites for the 570.
  • stangflyer - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link

    Any idea why the 580 sli takes such a huge dump going from 1920 res to the 2560 res. It loses half its framerate! I has 1.5 gigs of memory vs the 5870 1 gig and the 5870 crossfire goes from 50 fps at 1920 and 37 at 2560. The 580 sli goes from 72 fps at 1920 to 36 at 2560.

    Any ideas??
  • SmCaudata - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link

    It seems that AMD is finally getting cross-fire scaling well. The new 68xx cars are better than the old, but the 5870 is scaling as well as the Nvidia cards in a lot of cases. My guess is that with cross-fire or SLI the memory bandwidth is less of an issue. You don't fully double your framerate afterall. It is likely more dependant on the GPU clock speed..which is an advantage for AMD.

    I am really just taking a guess here. The other option is that it is simply an immature driver and will be fixed later.
  • nitrousoxide - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link

    Only when you used a dual-AMD-card configuration you will realize how much you will suffer from its poor drivers. It's fast but buggy and I've been waiting too long for AMD to finally come up with a Catalyst that at least runs as stable as the nVidia driver. So please AMD, give us a nice driver!
  • Anchen - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link

    Hey,
    Good review overall for an apples to apples comparison. I would have liked to see what it did overclocked as some have mentioned. On the Metro 2033 page the article says the following:

    "While Metro was an outstanding game for the GTX 580 to show off its performance advantage, the situation is quite different for the GTX 470. Here it once again fulfills its role as a GTX 480 replacement, but it’s far more mortal when it comes to being compared to other cards. "

    In the first sentence shouldn't it be "...the situation is quite different for the GTX570." and not the 470?
  • sanityvoid - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link

    Much as I love this site, the color schemes for the charts is really getting old. Why can't all the colors be the same EXCEPT for the one being reviewed. We're mostly all adults and can read so the other GPU's in the charts could be left all one color.

    Some other sites do this and it is much easier to read what is actually being reviewed, even if the review color is always the same on each chart. It still adds to the clutter of the charts. The human eye/brain gets distracted easy.

    Other than that, another good job on the article.
  • Ryan Smith - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link

    Thanks for the feedback.

    The colors are still a work in progress. We had some requests for additional colors in GPU articles to highlight the products we're immediately comparing the reviewed product to, which is what I did for this article. Certainly if you guys this this is too much, we can go back to fewer colors.
  • ATimson - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link

    Personally, my problem isn't so much that there are other colors, as that there's no good way to tell what they mean.

    Maybe one color for "other cards with benchmarks", one color for "immediate competition" (instead of each their own color), and a third for the product proper?
  • sanityvoid - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link

    I really like this idea. All one color for 'set' of reviews (if multiple), and one color for primary.

    BTW, I didn't know others were asking for more colors. I guess do what others want. For me, personally, I like the one color for primary and one color for all others. It is just the easiest for 'first glance' to be easily distinguishable.

    Peace.
  • kirankowshik - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link

    I dont know why I should go for the Nvidia GTX 580 / 570 series when I am getting the same (almost or more than) performance with ATI Radeon cards for a lower price. ATI HD 5970 is almost 30$ cheaper than GTX 580 but outperforms it in every single test. 5870 is not very close but atleast some what close and the performance of GTX 570 over 5870 does not justify a $100 gap between these two. Anyways, I think NVIDIA is just producing cards for name sake..with HD6900 series coming up, I will not be surprised if they offer huge performance leap over the GTX 580/570 for the same price...Again it will be what NVIDIA was when ATI released their batch of first DX11 cards and NVIDIA was struggling hard to get an answer to those...

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