Battlefield 4 Performance - 1080p FullHD

Many of the cards our readers might be used to reading about tend to make easy work of 1080p screens, but 1,920 x 1,080 is still by far the most common resolution used by gamers today, at least according to the latest results from Steam's hardware survey.


It's a fairly strong showing across the board in this test, as even the GTX 650 Ti BOOST performs with playable framerates, albeit barely, while the R9 270 and upwards maintain smoother rates of 30fps or more. Therefore, most people who have upgraded in the last year or so should be safe with these settings, although you'll still probably still want to tone it down a little at the low end – BF4 is certainly the sort of game that benefits from slicker framerates than 30fps, indeed we'd be aiming for 60fps. It's also the sort of game that appears to have the ability to scale very well across multiple GPUs, as the HD 7990 and GTX 690 scale by 91 and 85 percent compared to the R9 280X and GTX 680 respectively (these two cards being their closest single GPU counterparts).

AMD cards also perform particularly well, as they show less signs of slowdown than Nvidia's (as indicated by the minimum framerates), although the green team cards are more competitive on average framerates. Still, even going by average rates alone, the GTX 780 Ti and GTX Titan look rather poor compared to the R9 290X and R9 290 given the price margins between them all.


Switching from the ultra to the high preset typically results in performance boosts of between 35 and 45 percent, which is a significant increase and likely to be mostly a result of the loss of MSAA at high. At this setting, which as we saw is very close to ultra in terms of visuals, even cards like the GTX 660 Ti and R9 270 manage to average 60fps, although the cards below these drop off a little sharper than usual.

Nvidia cards once again appear to struggle in terms of their minimum framerates, although this isn't something that's unique to our benchmark, as during our initial testing we observed it elsewhere too. AMD's strong relationship with DICE presently along with the fact that its hardware is in both new consoles, has likely given it a head-start when it comes to optimising its drivers for the game.

Another interesting pattern is the huge jump between the HD 7770 and HD 7790. The latter only has 40 percent more stream processors, for example, but essentially doubles the performance of the HD 7770. One possible explanation for this (which is mostly speculation), is to do with the HD 7770 having 10 Compute Units and the HD 7790 having 14. The reason these numbers are significant is that the Xbox One APU feature 12 Compute Units, so it's feasible that the game has been optimised for this number and above (the PS4 has more), which would explain the sharp drop off in performance when you go below this amount of processing power.


At medium, we see Nvidia's hardware suddenly jump up the charts, with the GTX 780 Ti and GTX Titan at the top finally performing a little more like you'd expect and the former increasing its minimum framerate by 77 percent compared to the high preset (although the difference is rather meaningless at such high framerates). It therefore appears that one of the settings at high and ultra acts as something of a bottleneck to Nvidia hardware in demanding parts of the game, but driver updates have the potential to address this. Other Nvidia cards lower down the charts also show bigger improvements from medium than AMD ones typically do.

The R9 270X is also beginning to emerge as a particularly strong card. In every way other than its clock speeds (e.g. Compute Unit count, total memory bandwidth, GDDR5 amount), it's the weaker card when compared to the HD 7950, yet it actually surpasses this card here and is very close behind it at the ultra and high presets too. We can only theorise that this is due to how similar its specifications are to the PS4's APU, which likewise features 20 Compute Units (although two are disabled).

Sticking with the R9 270X, it also has a strong lead on the HD 7870, despite the only difference between them being clock speeds. It has a 5 percent higher core clock and 17 percent higher memory speed, and leads the HD 7870 here by 10 percent. Therefore, memory frequency and bandwidth certainly seem to play a decent part in BF4's performance.


There isn't much new to observe in this test other than that even the HD 7790 is able to provide a 60fps experience now thanks to the large loss of detail. Only the HD 7770 can be said to struggle, and the divide between it and the HD 7790 is even more apparent.