Games Benchmarks - Battlefield 2 (DirectX)

This game is the most recent one of this benchmark suite and it should tell us a bit about the how our cards cope with upcoming games. BF2 is primarily a DirectX 9-based engine with plenty of open terrain and some shader usage. We are using an internal Beyond3D recorded demo. Unlike the other games, BF2’s demos are not very deterministic: debris and animations will not behave exactly the same between several demo runs. The demos will also not play out from the same FPS view port as actual gameplay. Because of this and more, frame-rate results exhibit some peculiarities and many more runs are required to get consistent numbers.

Aside from the obvious speed difference between both cards it is interesting that the X850XT PE is no longer CPU limited at 1280x1024, if only slightly. In this test this card may be worth it if you have a 19” monitor or higher otherwise you’re better off with a less expensive graphics card. It is clear, however, that to achieve playable framerates without using FSAA a Radeon 9800 series only gets you 800x600 so upgrading the graphics card is still highly recommended.

Also of note is the performance difference between the two boards at low resolutions, which are the most CPU bound cases - there is a clear performance difference between the two graphics cards, which could be indicative of the increased vertex shading capabilities the newer board has in relation to the 9800 PRO and/or the title is using lots of buffered data (vertices, textures, etc.) such that even at low resolution the 128MB 9800 PRO has to address some from system RAM, reducing the performance; from what we have seen of Battlefield 2 so far the latter case seems likely.

Unfortunately, the Radeon 9800 PRO was unable to complete any demo runs with 6xAA. Sometimes the system would lock up, other times there would be severe rendering artefacts even at 640x480 which invalidated the results. This is likely a driver problem since it was still able to render correctly at 1024x768 if only 2x FSAA was used - again, this could be as a result of the quantity of data the title requires the graphics card to access. Nevertheless, since Battlefield 2 is such a demanding game and with the 9800 card already struggling without AntiAliasing any correct results with AA wouldn’t be that interesting.

As to the X850 XT PE, it suffers a slight drop in performance right from the low resolution, with 1024x768 further demonstrating that it starts getting graphics limited, meaning that in these settings the graphics board is the bottleneck, not the CPU. The game still remains extremely playable throughout though.