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.

Things that we focused on testing included DirectX 9 vs. DirectX 10, both the GeForce GTX 260 and Radeon HD 4870 graphics cards were used to collect data. A number of audio tests were conducted using the Phenom II X4 and Phenom II X2 processors, while the Phenom II X4 was also used to test a number of in-game quality settings.

Finally we also looked at the impact various CPU’s have on performance with the Radeon HD 5870, currently the world’s fastest single GPU graphics card. While preparing this article a number of different configurations were used and not all of them are going to be on display in this article as many of them did not provide any performance gains. Therefore we are trying to focus on the settings and configurations that do make a difference.

In order to edit the certain settings that are not in the game, users will have to open the "settings.ini" file in a text editing program such as notepad. This file can be found at the following location...

For Windows 7 & Vista users...
C:\Users\[username]\Documents\BFBC2\settings.ini

For Windows XP users...
C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\My Documents\BFBC2\settings.ini

Hardware - Intel Core i7 920 - x3 2GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 (CAS 8-8-8-20) - Seagate 500GB 7200-RPM (Serial ATA300) - Radeon HD 5870 (1GB) - Radeon HD 4870 (1GB) - GeForce GTX 260 (896MB) - Asus P6T Deluxe Software - Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit) - ATI Catalyst 10.2 - Nvidia Forceware 196.34

Hardware - Intel Core i5 750 - Intel Core i3 540 - Intel Pentium G9650 - x2 2GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 (CAS 8-8-8-20) - Seagate 500GB 7200-RPM (Serial ATA300) - Radeon HD 5870 (1GB) - Radeon HD 4870 (1GB) - GeForce GTX 260 (896MB) - Asrock P55 Extreme Software - Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit) - ATI Catalyst 10.2 - Nvidia Forceware 196.34

Hardware - AMD Phenom II X4 965 - AMD Phenom II X2 555 - AMD Athlon II X4 635 - AMD Athlon II X2 550 - x2 2GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 (CAS 8-8-8-20) - Seagate 500GB 7200-RPM (Serial ATA300) - Radeon HD 5870 (1GB) - Radeon HD 4870 (1GB) - GeForce GTX 260 (896MB) - Asus M4A79T Deluxe Software - Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit) - ATI Catalyst 10.2 - Nvidia Forceware 196.34

Those with older GeForce 8xxx series and GeForce 9xxx series graphics cards will possibly be struggling to play Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and manually adjusting the DirectX mode is a good way to gain a little extra performance. For details on how to force DX9 please read the “Testing Methodology” page.

As you can see, for those with a dual-core processor such as the Phenom II X2, when using the high quality in-game settings there is little to be gained by forcing DirectX9. Here we gained just 2fps at 1680x1050 and 1920x1200, which would hardly be noticeable. Using the medium quality in-game settings there were noticeable gains and at 1680x1050 we saw 6fps extra being rendered on average.

However with a quad-core processor such as the Phenom II X4 the performance gains are quite substantial. With the medium quality settings enabled around 36% more performance was had at 1680x1050. Even with the high quality settings we still saw a 24% performance gain at 1680x1050.

When testing with the Radeon HD 4870 we see no performance gains when using the Phenom II X2 with the high quality in-game graphic settings. The medium quality settings allow for around 4-5fps more when using the DX9 rendering mode. Interestingly when using the Phenom II X4 along with the medium quality settings, we saw no difference in performance when comparing DX9 and DX10. This was not the case when testing the high quality in game settings, as we saw a 17% performance gain at 1920x1200.

As you can see, we saw no real difference between any of these settings with our Phenom II X2 and Phenom II X4 processors clocked at 3.0GHz. This is not to say that these audio quality settings are not worth playing around with on your system. Also, please note that the AM3 test system was using Realtek onboard audio.

When using the medium quality preset, which sets everything to medium, the GeForce GTX 260 with a Phenom II X4 processor at 3.0GHz spat out 48.7fps. The same configuration using the low quality preset rendered an average of 71fps, a 46% performance increase.

When setting just effects to low we saw no performance improvement and the same can be said about undergrowth, textures, terrain and overgrowth. Amazingly all these settings by themselves appeared to have no difference on performance, at least where we were testing anyway.

What did have an impact were static objects which boosted performance by 14% and unsurprisingly shadows which boosted performance by 25%. Therefore it would appear that those looking to squeeze a little extra performance out of their system without sacrificing too much in the way of visual quality should look to reduce shadows.

As you can see, the quad-core AMD processors are considerably faster than their dual-core parts in Battlefield: Bad Company 2. The Core i3 540 is also left behind by the Core i5 750 despite featuring Hyper-Threading. The Core i5 750 does very well producing a similar level of performance as that of the Core i7 920 processor, additionally the Phenom II X4 965 also does very well.

Additionally, reducing the shadow quality to low will also buy you quite a few more frames per second. Also, those that wish to remain using DX10 rendering should consider reducing the shadow quality if they are unhappy with their current level of performance.

It was surprising to find that things such as textures, which had a huge impact on the visual quality, did not do much to improve performance when reduced. Admittedly this does not seem right at all, though having run the same test over and over again we were unable to find any evidence that this setting has an impact on performance.

Also, despite a number of users claiming large 15-20fps performance gains when changing the audio quality from the default HiFi setting to headphones, we were unable to replicate those results with either a Phenom II X2 or Phenom II X4 processor. At most the results varied by 1-2fps and that is well within the error margin for testing with FRAPS.

Something that you may have noticed is that we did not do any testing with anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering enabled. These are settings that many of you are going to want to enable as they significantly improve visual quality by reducing the amount of jagged edging that you will see. Personally I would rather sacrifice shadow quality in order to gain the ability to use anti-aliasing, even at extreme resolutions such as 2560x1600.

However our reason for neglecting to test with anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering enabled is simple, these settings hammer mid-range graphics cards when playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and there is no question about that. Again those wanting to use these rendering features will have to sacrifice other quality settings when gaming with the vast majority of mid-range graphics cards.

Other quality settings that can be disabled to help improve performance include things such as “bloom”. This is not a quality setting that was heavily featured in the section of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 that we tested, so we saw no performance differences there. That said, I did play a passage of the game which did feature heavy use of bloom, and with the Radeon HD 4870 around 5-10fps were gained by disabling it. Still, bloom does provide a very cool effect and we feel it is safe to leave this setting enabled.

Another quality setting which does have a huge impact on performance is HBAO, though its actual impact on the visual quality is very subtle and most will not notice a difference between having this setting enabled or disabled. Therefore for those looking to gain a little extra performance we strongly suggest keeping this setting disabled at all times, which can be done in-game.

Finally, given that there is no official benchmark for Battlefield: Bad Company 2, it is hard to test the various effects of all the games quality settings. Therefore we had to choose a section of the game that featured water, vegetation, heavy use of audio and a long draw distance, which we found in the third mission. Also please note that these tests were conducted in the single player portion of the game, as we have not yet stumbled upon an accurate means of testing the multiplayer mode.