Frame Rating: GTX 660 vs HD 7870, plus HD 7790, HD 7850, GTX 650 Ti BOOST

Battlefield 3 (DirectX 11)

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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!

Our Settings for Battlefield 3

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

Without SLI or CrossFire to worry about in these sets of data, the results from the FRAPS metrics and observed average frame rates are right in sync with each other.  I think you'll find this to be the case throughout all of this set of results. 

A first glance of data comparing the various GPUs shows the GTX 650 Ti BOOST to run just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 7850, while the HD 7790 outpaces the GTX 650 Ti pretty easily.

No big surprises in frame times with the exception of the hitches that are seen in the HD 7790 and (more frequently) on the GTX 650 Ti.

Another view of the performance of these cards shows the "about" the averages in the 50th percentile mark – the GTX 650 Ti BOOST is over 50 FPS with the HD 7850 just below it.  The HD 7790 runs at around 40 FPS average for the entire run and the original GTX 650 Ti hits 36 FPS or so.

The variance levels of the HD 7850 and GTX 650 Ti BOOST are great and only the original GTX 650 Ti seems to be problematic. 

 

These cards kind of struggle on BF3 at 2560×1440 but both the GTX 650 Ti BOOST and the HD 7850 run neck and neck at about 30 FPS.  In this instance the GTX 650 Ti original card is actually FASTER than the HD 7790 as well.

Once again the GTX 650 Ti card has the most variance, even though it is running "faster" than the HD 7790.  Both the HD 7850 and the GTX 650 Ti BOOST have tight collections of frame times and run evenly.

Another view of the same data here as we look at the minimum FPS graph with the poor GTX 650 Ti original bring up the rear…

Both the GTX 650 Ti and the HD 7790 have higher frame time variance and potential stutter rates than the higher performance HD 7850 and GTX 650 Ti BOOST.