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Battlefield 3 Preview Performance Preview @ [H]

I reduced all the in-game settings to the lowest values, and the stuttering went away on 6970 CFX. So now I'm going to bump up each one till I find that culprit that gives me stutter.
 
Thanks. Will there be any multimonitor tests done? I'm very curious as to what it takes to run this with 3 1080p monitors @ 5760x1080.
 
Brent_Justice said:
I reduced all the in-game settings to the lowest values, and the stuttering went away on 6970 CFX. So now I'm going to bump up each one till I find that culprit that gives me stutter.
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That's the way.. glad to see someone remembers how to properly troubleshoot! I'm anxious to see what the issue is. :D
 
So a 580 @ 1920x1200 should play the game with good fps and some ultra settings?
 
Brent_Justice said:
I reduced all the in-game settings to the lowest values, and the stuttering went away on 6970 CFX. So now I'm going to bump up each one till I find that culprit that gives me stutter.
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Are you sure you just can't notice the stuttering? Maybe you just raised the minimum FPS to a point where stuttering was imperceptible (60+ perceived FPS with microstutter, 100+ actual FPS without stutter).

It's a tough subject because every time you ask someone about micro stuttering they tell you phrases like "you don't notice it", or "can't feel it", or they say how it doesn't really hurt the "experience". Which sound of serious FUD or LALA.

I mean, I can't tell the difference between 80 and 100 FPS, but I'll shell out money for a card for that extra 20. Similarly, maybe I can't feel a 20FPS perceived drop due to microstutter, but I sure as hell won't buy a card that has that kind of broken leg.
 
2X GTX460's @820MHz each with 2gb Vram and Q6600 at 3.6GHz.....hopefully will eat it at 1920X1200...jeess my rig is still going strong....so pleased with my purchases :)
 
temps said:
its nice to see a cutting edge game engine that not only looks absolutely incredible but is well optimized too. its probably still not quite as good as Crysis at simulating a tropical rainforest, but I've had more "OMG WOW" eyepopping graphical moments in three hours of BF3 than I had in all of Crysis. This game is really something else...

But I don't quite get why they'd put so much effort into the graphics to make it more immersive, and then your player character doesn't cast a shadow? le sigh
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This is because your character doesnt actually have a body to cast a shadow from! Developers realize it would be a waste of polygons to draw the back of your own head, something which you will never see, so why bother. The result however is of course nothing to draw shadows from :) Although a few games did do this anyway, I think most opt not to. Not to mention it might be a little distracting seeing your own shadow frequently.
 
Extremely interested to know what's hanging up the Crossfire setup. I've been back and forth between 580s and 6970s the last few days... need something decisive!
 
The Stuttering issue has been found, and the fix is to remove 11.9 CAP 3.

This comes directly from AMD:

One note – about the stuttering for CFX, the latest CAP is causing that, once you remove it, you should be fine…we’re on it and fixing it as we speak.
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I have removed the CAP and verified that the stuttering is gone, I saw no negative impact on performance. This information has been added to Page 1 of the article.
 
Brent_Justice said:
the lens effects
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not picking on you, but i hate the lens effect. we are suppose to be playing a person not a robot with a camera as an eye. why is human realism mimicking a camera? boggles my mind. plenty of other games use it too.
 
gesicht said:
not picking on you, but i hate the lens effect. we are suppose to be playing a person not a robot with a camera as an eye. why is human realism mimicking a camera? boggles my mind. plenty of other games use it too.
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I think it's supposed to resemble the typical eye protection you see soldiers wearing. From a design standpoint I think it does a good job at adding imperfections to the world thus making it more realistic. I was playing FarCry2 earlier this week and the game is almost too bright and colorful, to the point of looking animated. The new lens flare kind of mimics eye fatigue in a way, afterall we rub our eyes for a reason, because even someone with 20/20 vision doesnt always have the best eyesight at any given moment.
 
Why on earth does the Ultra pre-set have both normal AA and post AA turned on? Ridiculous!
 
WhiteZero said:
Why on earth does the Ultra pre-set have both normal AA and post AA turned on? Ridiculous!
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I agree, it is odd, and I don't understand why either. People that don't know better are going to be getting really low performance with default settings.
 
That confused me.. are they both supposed to be on? Or if you use Post AA is normal AA supposed to be off? The way they set it up it seems they compliment each other but that seems counter intuitive to design
 
Bojamijams said:
That confused me.. are they both supposed to be on? Or if you use Post AA is normal AA supposed to be off? The way they set it up it seems they compliment each other but that seems counter intuitive to design
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It is, Antialiasing Deferred is standard traditional Multisample AA. I.E. 2X, 4X, 8X AA.

Antialiasing Post is NVIDIA's Shader Based FXAA method, which provides 4X AA like quality on all surfaces and objects and texture types with barely any performance hit.

You should never have both enabled at the same time, its a waste of resources, and will harm framerates.

Either use MSAA or FXAA, not both. I prefer FXAA to get great image quality with hardly any performance hit.

The options could stand to be labelled better for clarification.
 
I watched the guy from dice giving a presentation at that recent Nvidia event, he was saying that the two types of AA compliment each other acting slightly differently and giving a better image quality if used together.
 
technogiant said:
I watched the guy from dice giving a presentation at that recent Nvidia event, he was saying that the two types of AA compliment each other acting slightly differently and giving a better image quality if used together.
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I know why he is saying that, you can get improved polygon edge antialiasing with MSAA and when you enable FXAA you'll also get reduced aliasing on all alpha textures, reduce shader aliasing, and everything else. However, it is really going to drop your framerates to use both methods, MSAA will tax your video card's memory, and FXAA will tax your shaders. In reality, if you just use one, you will get better performance. Also in reality if you just use FXAA you will get similar to 4X MSAA quality on everything, including polygon edges, with a minimal performance hit, compared to straight up 4X MSAA. We'll do some performance and IQ tests in our full version review to flesh this out.
 
That will be interesting.....can't wait till my copy arrives....hmv dispatched today.... 2 - 5 day delivery :-/
 
Sedriss said:
So a 580 @ 1920x1200 should play the game with good fps and some ultra settings?
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I set mine to the High preset (and then turned motion blur off) and I was getting 60+ pretty much everywhere all the time. I didn't have time last night to try upping some settings to Ultra - but I'm sure you can at least turn some of them up and still get high rates. I maxed out at about 1200MB of VRAM also.
 
Forceman said:
I set mine to the High preset (and then turned motion blur off) and I was getting 60+ pretty much everywhere all the time. I didn't have time last night to try upping some settings to Ultra - but I'm sure you can at least turn some of them up and still get high rates. I maxed out at about 1200MB of VRAM also.
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With that much VRAM in use, my jaw drops at the thought of also introducing MSAA into the mix, which also eats up a lot of VRAM. Another reason to stick with FXAA. All very interesting stuff for us to test *rubs hands together* yesssss, my precious
 
Can't wait to let my 2X gtx460's @820Mhz with 2GB each vram loose on this....glad I went for the 2gb versions after.
 
Brent_Justice said:
It is, Antialiasing Deferred is standard traditional Multisample AA. I.E. 2X, 4X, 8X AA.

Antialiasing Post is NVIDIA's Shader Based FXAA method, which provides 4X AA like quality on all surfaces and objects and texture types with barely any performance hit.

You should never have both enabled at the same time, its a waste of resources, and will harm framerates.

Either use MSAA or FXAA, not both. I prefer FXAA to get great image quality with hardly any performance hit.

The options could stand to be labelled better for clarification.
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Does the Post AA work on AMD cards as well?
 
technogiant said:
FXAA was developed by Nvidia but also works on AMD....for a change....lol
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And MLAA works on NVIDIA GPUs, again, it depends how it is implemented. As long as the game developer implements in the game rendering pipeline, any GPU can use it. For example, Deus Ex supports MLAA in-game and FXAA, so both AMD and NVIDIA can use both MLAA and FXAA. In BF3, FXAA is implemented in the rendering pipeline, so NVIDIA and AMD GPUs can use it, and any other GPU if some other brand comes along.
 
Brent_Justice said:
Yes, as long as FXAA, or MLAA for that matter, are implemented in the game pipeline any GPU can use it. So in this game, AMD and NVIDIA GPUs can use Antialiasing Post (FXAA) in the game.
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Ok great -- I'm curious to see what settings I have to run at to get my E8400 (@3.5Ghz) and 5850 humming along... most reviewers don't look at older hardware with newer games, so it's always a learning experience.
 
I just recieved AMD's "BF3 Benchmark Guide", and even in AMD's own guide AMD is recommending and pushing FXAA as the best option for performance and image quality, stating that MSAA is questionable.

Many of the extremely competitive Battlefield 3™ players will want as many frames as they can get making MSAA a questionable option! We can also see from both charts provided that FXAA has a relatively low performance cost for the great level of Image Quality it provides. -AMD BF3 Benchmark Guide
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So we will definitely look at this and expand further upon it in our full evaluation.
 
AMD is seeing a 5% drop in perf with FXAA and upwards of 40% with 4X MSAA, so we will test that also and see.
 
Brent_Justice said:
I just recieved AMD's "BF3 Benchmark Guide", and even in AMD's own guide AMD is recommending and pushing FXAA as the best option for performance and image quality, stating that MSAA is questionable.



So we will definitely look at this and expand further upon it in our full evaluation.
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Think I'd still like to see how a combo of 2xMSAA and medium/high FXAA looks and performs...sort of best of both worlds and less of huge performance hit from maxing out the MSAA.
 
Looks like pretty promising performance potential for my 6870 xfire setup.

This and the early reports of much fun to be had are making it very difficult to hold off purchasing.
 
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