Frame Rating: High End GPUs Benchmarked at 4K Resolutions

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!

Our Settings for Battlefield 3

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

Keeping mind that we are testing the Radeon HD 7990 with both the 13.5 beta and the prototype driver, we see very different behavior.  The currently available driver sees a drop in perceived frame rate thanks to runt frame issues but that is lessened greatly with the driver build targeted for a June/July release.  Without that driver the HD 7990 is much slower than both the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 and the GTX Titan…but with it the power of the Tahiti GPUs is much better positioned to be the top performer. 

Frame times tell an interesting story as well, starting with the poor results seen by the current version of the Radeon HD 7990 driver.  The black line of the prototype driver makes a HUGE difference and allows it to nearly have the frame time consistency of the GTX 690.  The GTX Titan is definitely the smoothest performance but is also produces the highest frame times.

The HD 7990 with the prototype driver is able to hit nearly 50 FPS and the GTX 690 follows that with nearly 45 FPS average through the entirety of our run.  The Titan is much lower at 35 FPS but the currently performance of the HD 7990 with 13.5 beta driver falls to nearly 30 FPS.

The prototype driver definitely improves frame variance and lowers the potential stutter on the HD 7990 drastically but both the GeForce GTX 690 and GTX Titan maintain lower variances throughout the majority of our testing.  Only at about the 90th percentile does the GTX 690 surpass the HD 7990 with the prototype driver.

With the frame metering technology on the NVIDIA Kepler architecture there is very little variance between the FRAPS and the observed frame rates, though they do vary a bit more with 3-Way SLI.  Being able to run Battlefield 3 at 3840×2160 resolution at nearly 100 FPS is pretty damn impressive!

The hunter green line that represents the single Titan is very smooth and in reality so is the 2-Way SLI result.  The blue line for 3-Way Titan cards though definitely seems more variance – the band of color is thicker. 

50th percentile frame rates (which nearly matched the average) show Titan scaling from 35 FPS to 64 FPS to 93 FPS as we add in more $1000 graphics cards.  That is 82% scaling by adding the second card and another 45% when adding the third (262% from one to three Titans). 

Keeping an eye on the scale on the left hand side shows that even the 3-Way SLI has pretty minimal frame time variance in Battlefield 3.