NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 570: Filling In The Gaps

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

The latest game in the Battlefield series - Bad Company 2 – remains as one of the cornerstone DX11 games in our benchmark suite. 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.

Bad Company 2 is another game where the GTX 570 takes a notable lead over the GTX 480, and is clearly exceeding the theoretical clockspeed advantages of the GTX 570 and drifting in to architectural optimizations. Unfortunately this advantage for the GTX 570 plays out best at lower resolutions, resulting in the gap disappearing by the time we hit 2560. Even at 1920 the advantage is barely worth mentioning, meaning we’re once more at parity with the GTX 480.

Perhaps it would have been better for NVIDIA if that advantage had held, because it means the Radeon  5870 gets uncomfortably close at higher resolutions. Negligible at 2560, the GTX 570 advantage is only 10% at 1920. AMD’s strong CF scaling also puts NVIDIA in a tough position here, as the 6850 CF is a whopping 32% faster than the GTX 570 when it comes to Bad Company 2.

NVIDIA does manage to turn the tables with our Waterfall benchmark however, which serves as a proxy for minimum framerates. The GTX 570 is still tied with the GTX 480 here, but it’s also now at parity with the 6850CF and over 50% faster than the 5870, easily demonstrating that if you’re worried more about minimums than averages in Bad Company 2 that the 5870 and GTX 570 aren’t nearly as close as they were at first glance. Extra RAM would probably be of great benefit to AMD here.