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Today we are comparing various quality settings and hardware configurations using Battlefield: Bad Company 2. In doing so we hope to try and help gamers determine what kind of settings they can adjust to maximize their performance and what possible hardware upgrades they could make if necessary to improve performance...
Already just 2 weeks since its launch, we can safely say that Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has been a very successful title for EA and DICE. Just one week after its release the game had topped the UK sales charts, selling more copies that week across a range of gaming platforms than any other game. This did not surprise us as the demo topped 3.5 million downloads within days of its release.
 Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has been built around the Frostbite 1.5 engine, the same engine used in Battlefield 1943. One addition in particular, called Destruction 2.0, which adds bullet drop and the ability to destroy entire buildings instead of only walls, should make this latest title a little more exciting. The developer claims this revision of the Frostbite engine features multiple enhancements with a lot of effort gone into building the PC version. DICE (Digital Illusions CE) is said to be working on the Frostbite 2 engine at the moment. This upcoming engine will carry native support for DirectX 10.1 and DirectX 11, as well as parallelized processing supporting 2-8 parallel threads, allowing it to use the full capacity of a Core i7 processor, for example. The Frostbite 1.5 engine used on Battlefield: Bad Company 2, on the other hand, is mostly DirectX 10 based with a few additions catered to DX11 users, namely softened dynamic shadows and presumed performance improvements. A cut-down rendering version that only uses DX9 is also included, so Windows XP users can still enjoy the game.
 Without a doubt Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is certainly one of the better looking first person shooter games that we have seen in the last few years. Not only is this game great fun to play, but it is also very visually impressive. So much so that many have compared it to Crysis. However, great visuals are demanding on hardware and as such DICE recommends fairly serious system specifications. Quite a few gamers out there are having trouble achieving desirable frame rates with their current hardware. The problem with Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is that the game does not scale down very well and we have found there to be almost no performance difference between the high and medium quality presets. That said, there are a few things gamers can do in order to squeeze a little extra performance out of their current system, while we can also help point gamers in the right direction when upgrading. |
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Angelius |
Posted on: 03/18/2010 08:36 AM
Thanks for the article it has helped me quite a bit. I had changed to DX9 and it is smoother which is great and doesnt look much worse. Is there much difference between DX11 and DX10? Thanks Angelius |
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Dave |
Posted on: 03/18/2010 08:52 AM
Changing the audio did nothing for me either  Seems the best move is to upgrade to a quad-core if you have not already. |
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ProX |
Posted on: 03/18/2010 10:12 AM
I did not know you could force DX9, but then I never googled it  Thanks for that and nice work as usual. |
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Ray |
Posted on: 03/18/2010 02:50 PM
Great stuff thanks. The only thing missing are some screen shots of what Directx9 looks like compared to Directx10. If you could add that for me it would be great. |
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GamerRO25 |
Posted on: 03/18/2010 04:17 PM
I play this game at maximum settings !! 1920x1200 8AA and i get a avg of 100fps with a core i7 4ghz and 2 x 5870 . some said it is more demanding than Crysis but it is not true, at the same settings i get "only" 45fps ! I liked bc2 and it has nice graphics I am glad they are pushing for quad core cpu\s and faster graphics cards. |
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reisada |
Posted on: 03/18/2010 04:20 PM
would you please make a a guide like this for Metro 2033 when its released please? this was very helpfull, thanks and continue the good work |
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Steve Posts: 80 Joined: 2010-02-08 |
Posted on: 03/18/2010 11:12 PM
Thanks for all the great feedback guys. I will add some DX9 vs. DX10 quality shots for you soon and reisada I will look into doing a similar article for Metro 2033. |
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Jorie |
Posted on: 03/19/2010 04:26 AM
Very nice !!!! Can you perhaps add some core 2 duo 7xxx and 8xxx family cpu's. I think a lot of gamers actually still has this. Thanks. |
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Dingo |
Posted on: 03/20/2010 08:27 AM
just wondering why no 1920x1200 res in the CPU performance page. Perhaps that could be added in aswell? im just wondering because i plan on building a desktop and wanted to see if their is a (big) difference between 965, 750 and 920 cpus at that res. Any way thanks for the guide! |
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Banakon |
Posted on: 03/20/2010 01:45 PM
nice review Steve, you should include the performance of a Tri-core AMD. |
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Ironhammers |
Posted on: 03/21/2010 09:50 PM
Excellent post! Can really appreciate the work that must have gone into testing all those different setups! Keep up the good work! |
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mostafa007 Posts: 1 Joined: 2010-03-23 |
Posted on: 03/23/2010 02:02 PM
thx man , i really needed that guide i still have a core2 E6600 @3.4 GHZ , actually most of the games runs at max without a problem "except AA in some" but bc2 runs like crap :P even on medium settings "i have GTX260 + 4GB ram" i'm using win7 64-bit. so after ur article i found out that its a CPU issue , actually i dont wanna upgrade my cpu these days , so i thought about installing windows XP  , may be that will fix the problem and man !!! , running the game on XP on max settings @1920*1080 except AA is off and i get more than 50% performance gain compared to win 7 i didnt make any benchmarks actually , but through my online playing fps didnt drop lower than 30 in most cases and averaged @ 50 to 60fps |
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Gustav |
Posted on: 03/25/2010 12:37 AM
Great article. But I'm wondering what kind of GTX260 did you use? The 216 core or 196 core version? And I guess it was stock clocked? |
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Steve Posts: 80 Joined: 2010-02-08 |
Posted on: 03/25/2010 01:27 AM
Posted by Gustav on 03/25/2010 01:37 AM
The 216 core version, we will never use the 196 core again. Yes, it was standard clock speeds. Thanks for the feedback. |
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leexgx Posts: 9 Joined: 2010-03-29 Location: UK |
Posted on: 04/03/2010 11:35 PM
the DX9 setting was very useful to use i have lost AA thought getting an GTX480 soon so slow should not be an issue |
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Jerome |
Posted on: 04/21/2010 12:24 PM
The DX 11 shadows are better. I used to run this game with a GTS 250 on medium settings and the fps was always around 60, minimum 42 fps. I am running the GTX 480 and I get nearly the same minimum fps and setting it to maximum settings doesn't change the fps and the latest Nvidia driver for the GTX 480 makes the level loading take alot longer so I think alot of work has to be done for the next driver. BF Bad Company 2 is using an old, improved graphics engine. Other games offer better quality at a better framerate. TY |
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leexgx Posts: 9 Joined: 2010-03-29 Location: UK |
Posted on: 05/10/2010 04:31 AM
got an GTX480 now now i feel like i got an ATI card (the bug that makes it take an year to load the map or next map when it should only take 5-10 secs) got fed up in the end and forced DX10 setting wish Dice would fix that issue, performance wise in this game it works very well now dust does not kill the Frame rate |
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fausto412 |
Posted on: 06/18/2010 12:01 AM
thank god for this article!! i just got a 5870 and my favorite game is bfbc2, i also got a q9550 back in february. your last page on the 5870 tells me my cpu hold back the 5870 a little bit since according to tomshardware the x4 amd cpu is about the same as a q9550 at stock speeds. but that's showing with no AA on....would be nice to see how AA affects a Q9550 intel cpu with a 5870 video card. i think another page was needed to show how AA affects performance. |
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ProX |
Posted on: 06/18/2010 05:29 AM
@ fausto412 - no need to do that mate. Turning AA on just impacts the graphics card more and removes the CPU as the bottleneck. The reason why they test CPU scaling without AA is so that the GPU can run at full speed. |
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Nyfiken |
Posted on: 12/26/2010 11:47 PM
A bit late now, but isn't DX10.1 supposed to give better performance than DX10? Why wasn't this test using DX10.1 on the HD4870? I'm interested in this game and stumbled upon this test when searching for how well the HD4870 performs in it |
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Grok |
Posted on: 10/15/2011 11:37 AM
how come your cpu result is so different from Guru3D? did Phenom II beat Athlon II ? that's really important !! XD |