Battlefield 3
Battlefield 3 runs on Frosbite 2, probably the most advanced graphics engine currently on the market. A deferred rendering engine, it supports tessellation and calculates lighting via a compute shader.
We tested High and Normal modes and measured performance with Fraps, on a well-defined route. Note that a patch designed to improve performance on the Radeon HD 7000s came out on the 14th February. Naturally we installed it and noted a gain of between 1 and 2%.
The GeForce GTX 680 is particularly efficient in Battlefield 3, with an advantage of almost 20% over the Radeon HD 7970 in high quality mode. In Ultra, which includes MSAA 4x, it has just a 12% lead.
At very high resolutions, the GTX 680’s lead is reduced. Note that rendering in surround is very jumpy with multi-GPU solutions. In spite of giving 50 fps in surround, the Radeon HD 7870s give something more akin to a 25 fps sensation and the game is unplayable.
