Battlefield 3

Battlefield 3 (DirectX 11)


 

Battlefield 3™ leaps ahead of its time with the power of Frostbite 2, DICE's new cutting-edge game engine. This state-of-the-art technology is the foundation on which Battlefield 3 is built, delivering enhanced visual quality, a grand sense of scale, massive destruction, dynamic audio and character animation utilizing ANT technology as seen in the latest EA SPORTS™ games.

Frostbite 2 now enables deferred shading, dynamic global illumination and new streaming architecture. Sounds like tech talk? Play the game and experience the difference!

AMD Radeon HD 7990 6GB Review - Malta Gets Frame Rated - Graphics Cards 28

AMD Radeon HD 7990 6GB Review - Malta Gets Frame Rated - Graphics Cards 29

AMD Radeon HD 7990 6GB Review - Malta Gets Frame Rated - Graphics Cards 30

Our Settings for Battlefield 3

Here is our testing run through the game, for your reference.

Our first test result shows that the best case scenario, the new Radeon HD 7990 is just a bit slower than the HD 7970s in CrossFire and faster than both the GTX 690 and the GTX TITAN across the board.

Our observed frame rates though, after removing any runt frames that take up an insignificant amount of space on the screen, are much lower and you can see that the HD 7990 suffers in the same way as the HD 7970 CrossFire configuration does.  Both NVIDIA solutions though maintain consistent frame rates compared to the previous result.

The black and orange lines that represent the AMD HD 7990 / HD 7970 CF results are both indicative of the of the alternating high and low frame times that result in runt frames and artificially inflated frame rate numbers.  The green line that is the GTX TITAN is the best overall result in this regard with tight frame times and the GTX 690 is a bit more variant but is still doing better than the AMD options.

Taking away the runt frames, the average frame rates both the HD 7990 and the HD 7970s is just over 100 FPS while the GTX Titan hits 120 and the GTX 690 jumps to 140 FPS. 

By far the least variant configuration here is with the GTX Titan card as even the GTX 690 sees some degradation here.  Both the HD 7990 and the HD 7970s in CrossFire are much worse relationally.

 

The observed and FRAPS reported frame rates again differ with the CrossFire solutions (which the HD 7990 is still built around) while the NVIDIA options maintain the same result, even the dual-GPU GTX 690.

The comparison between the NVIDIA and AMD results is even more dramatic at 2560×1440 with the GTX Titan producing by far the best result of the four.  Even those the frame times are higher resulting in lower frame rates, there is basically no frame time deviation.  The black and orange lines though are quite the opposite.

The average frame rate differences expand at this resolution as well – the new HD 7990 is only able to get 58 FPS on average for the full benchmark run while the Titan hits 75 FPS and the GTX 690 95 FPS. 

Our graph that shows the potential for stutter gives the GTX cards the benefit once again with even the GTX 690 and its pair of GK104 GPUs a solid result, leaving the HD 7990 and the HD 7970s well behind.

 

Though our HD 7970 CrossFire results didn't pan out correctly, the HD 7990 was able to give us some solid data.  Observed frame rates are MUCH lower…

Our problems with Eyefinity continue with the HD 7990, as we see more dropped frames than runts.  The GTX 690 is definitely a more variant experience than the GTX Titan but both are very playable experiences. 

Just so you can see what the HD 7990 result looks like on its own, with the drop data included, I have shown you above. 

Even though the Titan has a lower average frame rate (the 50th percentile) it actually keeps its frame rate a bit longer than the GTX 690 that has more variance to its frame times.  The HD 7990 is barely able to breach the 30 FPS mark.

Because our frame variance data doesn't have runts to judge differences by, the HD 7990 Eyefinity 5760×1080 result actually appears to be good, though with that one major caveat. 

 

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