Battlefield 3

Our final multiplayer action game of our benchmark suite is Battlefield 3, DICE’s 2011 multiplayer military shooter. Its ability to pose a significant challenge to GPUs has been dulled some by time and drivers, but it’s still a challenge if you want to hit the highest settings at the highest resolutions at the highest anti-aliasing levels. Furthermore while we can crack 60fps in single player mode, our rule of thumb here is that multiplayer framerates will dip to half our single player framerates, so hitting high framerates here may not be high enough.

GTX 770 is going to struggle with BF3 at 2560 with everything turned up, but dropping down to 1920 is enough to get the average framerate well above 60fps, and consequently the minimum framerates should be well above 30fps too. In this case this is another game NVIDIA traditionally excels at, leading to a 15% performance advantage over the 7970GE. The gains against the GTX 680 are far more muted at just 6% - indicating that we’re not seeing much of a benefit from more memory bandwidth – while it’s another very big step up from the GTX 570 at 83%.

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  • karasaj - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    Nice! I heard that the 770 was going to perform much better than this, but I'm glad to see an improvement as well as lower prices. This might prompt a price cut by AMD, which could benefit everybody.
  • axien86 - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    When the GTX 770 is so far behind even ancient cards in GPU compute and Folding... You know it is time to recall the overheating GTX 770 back to Nvidia and design something with real improvements.
  • freespace303 - Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - link

    80c load is quite common and safe for GPUs that have stock coolers. If those temps concern you, wait until these are released with aftermarket coolers installed.
  • tipoo - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    This really could have been called "680 gets bios update, price drop".
  • BeauCharles - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    Its not their top single GPU card, its their third place. The fact its tying with AMD's first place pretty much speaks for itself.
  • tipoo - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    Does "first place" matter, or do price points? If the 7970 was AMDs twentieth best card it still wouldn't change that it's competing with the 770s price point.
  • EJS1980 - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    Even though a lot of AMD dudes will surely get butthurt with you, your point is right on. Heavy is the head...
  • tipoo - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    I'm not an "AMD dude", but I fail to see why that's right on. Price points matter, where the products rank within an individual companies line don't. If the 770 was Nvidias 100th best graphics card, at the same price/performance what would that change? Nothing.
  • EJS1980 - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    I guess I should clarify that I was making a generalization, and wasn't referring to anyone in particular.
  • sna1970 - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    what matters is how many FPS you get per dollar.

    who cares about getting flagships when you reach 60fps ? and how many people pay 4000$ for high end gaming machine ?

    I choose nvida over AMD for one reason , PhysX.

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