Battlefield 4

One of the older games in our benchmark suite, DICE’s Battlefield 4 remains a staple of MP gaming. Even at its age, Battlefield 4 remained a challenging game in its own right, as very few mass market MP shooters push the envelope on graphics quality right now. As these benchmarks are from single player mode, based on our experiences our rule of thumb here is that multiplayer framerates will dip to half our single player framerates, which means a card needs to be able to average at least 60fps if it’s to be able to hold up in multiplayer.

Battlefield 4 - 3840x2160 - Ultra Quality (0x MSAA)

Battlefield 4 - 2560x1440 - Ultra Quality

Battlefield 4 - 1920x1080 - Ultra Quality

As a game that has traditionally favored NVIDIA, Battlefield 4 makes for a very clean sweep of the field. The GTX 1080 takes top honors with the GTX 1070 some distance behind it. Notably, the two Pascal cards become the first cards to cross 60fps at 4K, which means that they’re the first cards we can be reasonably sure won’t have framerate dips below 30fps in multiplayer.

Looking at our standard generational comparisons, both GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 improve upon their predecessors by about what we’d expect; 67% and 58% respectively. Or to see how GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 compare, we find that the GTX 1080 leads its cut-down sibling by between 20% and 25%, with the gap increasing with the resolution. This is consistent with what we know about GTX 1080, as its bandwidth advantage means that it’s going to have an easier time pushing pixels at 4K, as the case is here.

Finally, to check in on the GTX 680, we find the GTX 1080 has only improved in performance by 2.8x, which is actually a bit less of a gain than the average. None the less we’ve gone from a card that can’t quite muster 1080p with 4xMSAA to a card that can easily handle 4K without any MSAA.

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  • Scali - Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - link

    There is hardware to quickly swap task contexts to/from VRAM.
    The driver can signal when a task needs to be pre-empted, which it can now do at any pixel/instruction.
    If I understand Dynamic Load Balancing correctly, you can queue up tasks from the compute partition on the graphics partition, which will start running automatically once the graphics task has completed. It sounds like this is actually done without any interference from the driver.
  • tamalero - Friday, July 22, 2016 - link

    I swear the whole 1080 vs 480X remind me of the old fight between the 8800 and the 2900XT
    which somewhat improved int he 3870 and end with a winner whit the 4870.
    I really hope AMD stops messing with the ATI division and lets them drop a winner.
    AMD has been sinking ATI and making ATI carry the goddarn load of AMD's processor division failure.
  • doggface - Friday, July 22, 2016 - link

    Excellent article Ryan. I have been reading for several days whenever i can catch five minutes, and it has been quite the read! I look forward to the polaris review.

    I feel like u should bench these cards day 1, so that the whingers get it out od their system. Then label these reviews the "gp104" review, etc. It really was about the chip and board more than the specific cards....
  • PolarisOrbit - Saturday, July 23, 2016 - link

    After reading the page about Simultaneous Multi Projection, I had a question of whether this feature could be used for more efficiently rendering reflections, like on a mirror or the surface of water. Does anyone know?
  • KoolAidMan1 - Saturday, July 23, 2016 - link

    Great review guys, in-depth and unbiased as always.

    On that note, the anger from a few AMD fanboys is hilarious, almost as funny as how pissed off the Google fanboys get whenever Anandtech dares say anything positive about an Apple product.

    Love my EVGA GTX 1080 SC, blistering performance, couldn't be happier with it
  • prisonerX - Sunday, July 24, 2016 - link

    Be careful, you might smug yourself to death.
  • KoolAidMan1 - Monday, July 25, 2016 - link

    Spotted the fanboy apologist
  • bill44 - Monday, July 25, 2016 - link

    Anyone here knows at least the supported audio sampling rates? If not, I think my best bet is going with AMD (which I'm sure supports 88.2 & 176.4 KHz).
  • Anato - Monday, July 25, 2016 - link

    Thanks for the review! Waited it long, read other's and then come this, this was the best!
  • Squuiid - Tuesday, July 26, 2016 - link

    Here's my Time Spy result in 3DMark for anyone interested in what an X5690 Mac Pro can do with a 1080 running in PCIe 1.1 in Windows 10.
    http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/13607976?

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