XFX GeForce 7950 GT 570M Extreme

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Battlefield 2

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Battlefield 2 features an all-new game engine based on the DirectX 9.0 API. There is no Shader Model 3.0 support, but the majority of hardware will use a Shader Model 2.0++ mode that includes support for Normal Maps, Parallax Mapping, Full-Resolution Dynamic Shadowing, Post Processing and Fog.

The game will look the same on both NVIDIA and ATI hardware, so there is no advantage of choosing one over the other in image quality related circumstances. The only major difference is that Ultra Shadow 2 is utilised on NVIDIA's hardware, while the shadowing on ATI hardware is done using a slightly different technique.

We patched the game to version 1.4 and then played three five-minute segments of the 'Strike at Karkand' map, reporting the median frame rate. We found that there was no ready way to duplicate testing situations manually in this game, so we felt that taking a typical slice of action from the game was the best way to report our findings. We controlled anti-aliasing from inside the game, while anisotropic filtering was set to 8xAF when the 'Texture Filtering' option was set to 'High'.

Much like Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Battlefield 2 suffers from some rather harsh texture filtering optimisations if you use NVIDIA's default quality setting. Thus, we have used the high quality driver setting for our BF2 testing to reduce the texture filtering shortcomings. The increased resolution didn't result in lower 'playable' image quality on the ATI Radeon X1900XT or XFX GeForce 7950 GT 570M Extreme, but it did mean we had to change transparency supersampling to transparency multisampling on the reference GeForce 7950 GT.

The XFX GeForce 7950 GT 570M Extreme delivered a higher minimum and since we saw an average frame rate that was very similar to what we experienced on the Radeon X1900XT 512MB, we would say that although the filtering quality on XFX's GeForce 7950 GT wasn't quite as good as ATI's when the high quality driver setting was used, it delivers an ever-so slightly better gaming experience. However, if you are looking for the best image quality, then ATI's card is a better choice.