Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Now approaching a year old, Bad Company 2 remains as one of the cornerstone DX11 games in our benchmark suite. Based on the Frostbite 1.5 engine, it will be replaced in complexity by the DX10+ only Frostbite 2 engine (and Battlefield 3) later this year. 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.

Historically Bad Company 2 favors two patterns in our tests: it favors shader speed, and it just favors AMD in general. Today is no exception, and while the GTX 590 can hit nearly 80fps, that’s still 10fps short of the 6990. Given that it’s normally shader bound our overclocked cards pick up the slack, but it’s not enough—not even the GTX 590 OC can reach the 6990, let alone an overclocked 6990.

Meanwhile our water benchmark gives us a good idea of what minimum framerates are like. Interestingly NVIDIA more than chips away at AMD’s lead here, and the GTX 590 and its overclocked variants top the charts. Given these scores it’s likely we’re approaching a non-GPU bottleneck in the game.

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  • WhatsTheDifference - Monday, April 4, 2011 - link

    how many years has it been since *any* 4890 has been represented in the charts..? why is it this way? come on. exclude nV's earlier gen top dog and maybe no one will notice.
  • Scandalman - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - link

    Interesting article, however it would be useful to know what power supplies you recommend.

    I am interested in using a pair of these cards for running an OpenCL application flat out and I want to know if my Tagan 1100W supply is sufficient; It's running a GA890-GPA-UD3H/Phenom x4 955 with two unlocked 6950's at the moment.

    Looks like it might just do it with a whisker to spare, but I'd like to avoid expensive pyrotechnics.
  • nyran125 - Sunday, June 19, 2011 - link

    im not really into giving all my money to the same manufactorer every year just to buy a new video card that does nothing else accept increase FPS by 3-10 fps. Sometimes it doesnt increase it at all. If what you have already owns everything out there, i dont see the point. I only see the point if what you have DOESNT do what you want it to do. AMD 6870 is running every game iver played so far on max withotu issue at highest resolution. We are in the console era.

    Unless your playing Arma 2 and Shogun total war 2, but even then thats more CPU related adn an amd 6870 combined with a high end cpu prety much gets the job done at high res. NOT 30" though. Bu my eyes are screwed up enough from staring at a montier, than even want to go to 30 ".

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