How much is BF3 pushing PC graphics?

HardLiner

Gawd
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Nov 22, 2006
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I'm just curious Is the PC capable of putting out better graphics or is BF3 the best it can do with the latest hardware?
 
So far.. it's probably one of the best looking games on the PC. It also really boils down to how well they design their engine.
 
cpu usage wise its leading the pack.

got to love seeing 90%+ utilization makes my jump from a 955BE to an 8120 so worth it.
 
I'd think it obviously depends on your hardware.

If you have a quad-core and say a 6870 range card then yes...if you have a hex-core and a GTX590 then no...but then again you can't design a whole game on a certain set of PC hardware.

Now that's not to say they couldn't have increased the amount of detail and what not. But for what it is it looks pretty damn good.

I mean, really the only thing I could think they could add was real time full physics based destruction and water physics and what not.

So anyways...yes, they could be better...they could A LOT better...like genuinely real life...but then we'd have another Crysis on our hands :-p
 
BF3 does look awesome can't wait for my upgrade so I can play it first hand. So it will probably be the graphics king for a while?...I doubt Crytek will go all out with Crysis 3 like they did for the first one.
 
I know I will get some flame posts for saying this but I strongly believe bf3 looks like crap compared to crysis/cyrsis warheadcrysis 2/metro 2033 and probably others.

I feel like the only person on the planet that is not impressed with frostbite 2 at all. The over the top lens flares, color grading, a poor terrain textures occasionally ruin the immersion for me. It still looks better than most AAA games out at the moment but then again most AAA games are poorly done console ports that show almost no difference in image quality between the console and PC versions other than AA/AF/resolution/framerate. With that in mind I'm glad they decided to actually work on building a graphics engine that could gain some more benefit from high end PC hardware since we have so few developers doing that these days. The low end scaling of frostbite 2 is terrible. An 8800GT/9800GT is forced to run the game at 1280 x 720 on low settings just to hit 30fps average with a GTS 250/450 running a bit faster at 40-45 fps, the low settings feel more like medium settings and still look very good, which makes me wonder why they don't have a "very low settings" option for low end hardware. The difference in both image quality and performance between the low/medium/high settings is surprisingly low, the engine looks decent at high/ultra settings but doesn't scale very well at all. Even if you go out and buy a brand new $80 video card you're screwed no matter how low you set your resolution and settings.

For me cryengine 2.0/2/5/3.0 is still the ultimate engine in terms of image quality, hardware performance scaling, and the fact that it supports pretty much any effect or rendering process you can think of (other than ray tracing and point mapping of course). Not to mention the SDK is great. I still can't understand to this day why so many people were bitching about crysis being poorly optimized just because they couldn't run it on max settings at a decent framerate, just lower your damn settings. On low settings and 1280 x 720 crysis runs fine on an 8600GT/7800GT (>30 fps) while scaling all the way up to SLI/crossfire setups with settings that show substantial improvements in image quality and a host of new rendering techniques and effects not just different draw distances/texture resolutions/etc. I have yet to see a game scale that well across all of the hardware available at the time. BF3 is 4 times as demanding as crysis at its lowest settings, you're far more likely to be able to run crysis than bf3.
 
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Honestly only the first level in the campaign looked great. The rest were pretty mah~
 
BF3 is great, but Crysis 2 and The Witcher 2 are probably a little better looking in some ways. All 3 games are cream of the crop though.
 
To my knowledge Metro 2033 is pretty much ahead of the pack with heavy use of dynamic lighting, advanced shaders, soft shadows and DX11 tessellation.

BF3 is pretty mild from what I've seen, it's not bringing systems to their knees like Metro 2033 is.
 
I think BF3 may be pushing the boundaries simply given its scope - none of the other games mentioned ever ran with 64 players in multiplayer on such huge maps. So while some people may say that Crysis and Crysis 2 look better (in many cases I agree), it's a different ballgame when you're rendering an area so massive.

Having said that developers aren't given access to program directly on the metal for the PC, so the software layer in between will always be a massive drag on performance. There's always more to give, and I'm sure if BF3 were PC exclusive it would have looked even more impressive.

Regardless, it's not even the visuals (however impressive they are) that get me the most, it's the audio. I've never ever heard such incredible audio from a game.
 
"Even if you go out and buy a brand new $80 video card you're screwed no matter how low you set your resolution and settings."

That's been the case for a while, man. Video cards that cheap are primarily HTPC cards, nothing more. This is a next-gen game, if you want to play it, <$100 cards aren't really going to cut it.
 
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Screw the SP campaign. That's not the gauge you should be using for this conversation.
 
To my knowledge Metro 2033 is pretty much ahead of the pack with heavy use of dynamic lighting, advanced shaders, soft shadows and DX11 tessellation.

BF3 is pretty mild from what I've seen, it's not bringing systems to their knees like Metro 2033 is.

Well just because a game brings a system to its knees doesn't always mean that its the most advanced. Sometimes non-optimized code can play part in it. Don't get me wrong, Metro 2033 is fantastic looking too, but the game mostly takes place in the dark, it remains to be seen if they could have done the same as what BF3, Crysis 2 or The Wticher has done in the daylight outdoors.
 
Well just because a game brings a system to its knees doesn't always mean that its the most advanced. Sometimes non-optimized code can play part in it. Don't get me wrong, Metro 2033 is fantastic looking too, but the game mostly takes place in the dark, it remains to be seen if they could have done the same as what BF3, Crysis 2 or The Wticher has done in the daylight outdoors.

cough Crysis cough
 
Well just because a game brings a system to its knees doesn't always mean that its the most advanced. Sometimes non-optimized code can play part in it. Don't get me wrong, Metro 2033 is fantastic looking too, but the game mostly takes place in the dark, it remains to be seen if they could have done the same as what BF3, Crysis 2 or The Wticher has done in the daylight outdoors.

I don't get the drooling over Metro's graphics, it never WOW'ed me by any means. TW2 is also a single player RPG, and you can't blow up the houses in the villages, etc.
 
Graphics wise, I have a 1090T with a 6850 graphics card + 16GB DDR3, I can run at 1920x1080 with everything pretty much at max and still get 50+ FPS, which is totally acceptable. The game looks fantastic and I see literally no slow down on MP games.
 
Graphics wise, I have a 1090T with a 6850 graphics card + 16GB DDR3, I can run at 1920x1080 with everything pretty much at max and still get 50+ FPS, which is totally acceptable. The game looks fantastic and I see literally no slow down on MP games.

Define "maxed" because a single HD 6850 can't play BF3 at 1920x1080 at Ultra Settings w/ AA/AF at 50+ FPS.
 
Well just because a game brings a system to its knees doesn't always mean that its the most advanced. Sometimes non-optimized code can play part in it. Don't get me wrong, Metro 2033 is fantastic looking too, but the game mostly takes place in the dark, it remains to be seen if they could have done the same as what BF3, Crysis 2 or The Wticher has done in the daylight outdoors.

Sure, but there's no evidence to believe either game is terribly unoptimized so...
 
cpu usage wise its leading the pack.

got to love seeing 90%+ utilization makes my jump from a 955BE to an 8120 so worth it.

GPU maybe...because it's really not that CPU-intensive as a lot of benchmarks and testing have shown.

On-topic, probably the best looking game out there right now considering all that it does gameplay-wise.
 
There is definitely a difference between pure graphics for the sake of graphics, ie, Crysis. BF3 is not on that level, but the graphics and overall package is immersive enough to provide an excellent visual experience. I think you really need to get past a polygon by polygon comparison. BF3 is pushing the envelope in that respect.
 
That's been the case for a while, man. Video cards that cheap are primarily HTPC cards, nothing more. This is a next-gen game, if you want to play it, <$100 cards aren't really going to cut it.

This is not true. An $80 video card (GT 440 for example) plays nearly anything at a decent framerate if you lower settings and/or resolution. But not bf3, no chance in hell. Even crysis/crysis warhead/crysis 2 will run fine on a GT 440 on low settings at a high resolution.

I'm pretty sure that if you look at the minimum settings bf3 is now the single most demanding game out there.

Honestly only the first level in the campaign looked great. The rest were pretty mah~
Totally agreed. Wish all of the campaign were like that, not some villa house crap.

I'de have to disagree. In my opinion the first level was one of the least impressive. The level inside the mothership for example was jaw droppingly amazing (in terms of graphics).

The image quality is a combination of the engine and the assets (mesh, textures, etc.). BF3 has a greatly inferior engine to many other games but is saved because it has some very nice assets. That was the one area where crysis was severly lacking, some stuff has really bad textures and mesh (trees, rocks, and some terrain).

But it's the engine that you need to look at when you're talking about pushing the hardware or efficiently using the hardware.

cough Crysis cough

Apparently some people think optimizing = removing things to reduce hardware load. Like it or not cryengine 2.0/2.5/3.0 are some of the best optimized engines ever made. Before crytek came along nobody thought effects like ambient occlusion were possible to do in real time. If you look at the features of cryengine most of it is a long list of things that previously could not be done in real time, many of which took years for other game engines to start using.

FB2 is less efficient when you look at what it's doing and how much GPU throughput it needs to do it. It's a decent engine but it's not on par with metro 2033 or cryengine. Like I said before it looks decent at max settings but doesn't scale very well.

I think BF3 may be pushing the boundaries simply given its scope - none of the other games mentioned ever ran with 64 players in multiplayer on such huge maps. So while some people may say that Crysis and Crysis 2 look better (in many cases I agree), it's a different ballgame when you're rendering an area so massive.

Having said that developers aren't given access to program directly on the metal for the PC, so the software layer in between will always be a massive drag on performance. There's always more to give, and I'm sure if BF3 were PC exclusive it would have looked even more impressive.

Regardless, it's not even the visuals (however impressive they are) that get me the most, it's the audio. I've never ever heard such incredible audio from a game.

This I agree with. The audio engine stands above every other game in existance.

Crysis looked great in single player but terrible in MP (garbage textures and assets). BF3 definitely has the best looking MP experience of any game at the moment. However player made maps for MP in crysis often looked amazing because they used good assets and didn't look rushed. It's a shame that you need player made content to show off what the engine was capable of, the levels and multiplayer maps in crysis felt really rushed.
 
The PC is definitely capable of pushing better looking graphics but if you're talking about utilizing what we have now, I'd say DICE did it fantastically. Battlefield 3 alone drove thousands of dollars in PC builds and upgrades by itself. No other title since Crysis had such an anticipatory impact on PC hardware sales.
 
The low end scaling of frostbite 2 is terrible. An 8800GT/9800GT is forced to run the game at 1280 x 720 on low settings just to hit 30fps average with a GTS 250/450 running a bit faster at 40-45 fps, the low settings feel more like medium settings and still look very good, which makes me wonder why they don't have a "very low settings" option for low end hardware. The difference in both image quality and performance between the low/medium/high settings is surprisingly low, the engine looks decent at high/ultra settings but doesn't scale very well at all. Even if you go out and buy a brand new $80 video card you're screwed no matter how low you set your resolution and settings.

For balance reasons obviously. They can't just turn off shadows/ vegetation or truncate it abruptly at a distance otherwise it will be quite unfair to players who run it with all the eye candy on. Mesh and terrain quality doesnt do much to the performance as well cos the main bottleneck in this game is not geometry processing.
 
I'm just curious Is the PC capable of putting out better graphics or is BF3 the best it can do with the latest hardware?

You can upgrade your gpu first and see how it performs. At 1080p, a 6950 should do well (without AA).
 
I think it strikes the perfect balance.

When Crysis came out, it was just head and shoulders better looking than anything out on the market at the time. But that also meant that there wasnt anything out there that could play it. The $500 GTX295 could barely. Thats a little too much.

BF3 came out and it looks better than most things out and definitely moved the envelope up a notch or two but you can still play it maxed out without having to drop $1000 on video cards. Youre still gonna have to put some money into your rig to max it out but its not a back breaker.

I think I prefer these smaller steps as opposed to giant leaps. It would be great to see a mind blowing set of graphics but whats the point if Ill never be able to afford the equipment necessary to run it.
 
For balance reasons obviously. They can't just turn off shadows/ vegetation or truncate it abruptly at a distance otherwise it will be quite unfair to players who run it with all the eye candy on. Mesh and terrain quality doesnt do much to the performance as well cos the main bottleneck in this game is not geometry processing.

This actually makes sense. I'm a lot more inclined to believe that they did this on purpose for balance reasons than believe they were just ridiculously incompetent. This was a major complaint in previous BF games where players sometimes ran the game on low settings on purpose to gain an advantage.

When Crysis came out, it was just head and shoulders better looking than anything out on the market at the time. But that also meant that there wasnt anything out there that could play it. The $500 GTX295 could barely. Thats a little too much.

This is not true. Even an 8500GT had no problem playing crysis on low. I was shocked an appalled at all of the PC gamers shouting insults at crytek calling the engine things like "an unoptimized piece of garbage" just because they couldn't run it on max settings. The game actually had very low system requirements it's just really hard to max out (which is exactly what they were going for, an engine that is highly scalable and future proof). I swear there are some PC gamers that can't grasp the concept of not running a game at max settings. They just upgrade there hardware whenever they can no longer run all there games at max settings, and since they couldn't do that with crysis they got angry and made fun of it for having high requirements when it didn't.
 
GPU maybe...because it's really not that CPU-intensive as a lot of benchmarks and testing have shown.

On-topic, probably the best looking game out there right now considering all that it does gameplay-wise.

no i ment cpu, atleast in co-op it will use 95%+ of my 4.5ghz 8120.

MP uses more like 75%
 
I swear there are some PC gamers that can't grasp the concept of not running a game at max settings. They just upgrade there hardware whenever they can no longer run all there games at max settings, and since they couldn't do that with crysis they got angry and made fun of it for having high requirements when it didn't.

Count me as one of those people. I play all games at max settings and if my hardware won't do it, its time to upgrade.
 
The PC is definitely capable of pushing better looking graphics but if you're talking about utilizing what we have now, I'd say DICE did it fantastically. Battlefield 3 alone drove thousands of dollars in PC builds and upgrades by itself. No other title since Crysis had such an anticipatory impact on PC hardware sales.

I'm curious, is there data available that shows an increase in hardware sales?

The low end scaling of frostbite 2 is terrible. An 8800GT/9800GT is forced to run the game at 1280 x 720 on low settings just to hit 30fps average with a GTS 250/450 running a bit faster at 40-45 fps, the low settings feel more like medium settings and still look very good, which makes me wonder why they don't have a "very low settings" option for low end hardware.

I don't think it's terrible at all given the 8800 GT came out in 2007 - I'm not exactly feeling for people that haven't upgraded in over 4 years and would expect to run at or above 720p with anything above the bare minimum settings in a AAA game. Just quickly scanning newegg I see $100-$130 cards that will play this on high settings at 16x10 with ~30 odd FPS (the GTS 450 and 5770 and 5750 are plenty capable of doing this). The low end user may not be someone that looks to upgrade just because they can't max out a game, but they do need to upgrade at some point and 4 years is quite a long time. This seems much more like the normal cycle to me, for a very low end user. Also, as has been said before, given the scope and detail that needs to be put into the game to ensure that it is equitable and fair to all players, there are a lot of things that can't really be scaled down (smoke still needs to appear, and it still needs to obscure things; maps are still huge).

If someone is that interested in saving a few bucks, either look for deals or hit the FS/FT forum for higher end cards.
 
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Crysis was good, but had crap object popup, it bothered by back then and still bother me now. CryEngine 2 is handling that much better, Frostbite 2, too!
 
Pushes graphics pretty good. Not only because it makes use of high end hardware, but because it runs well doing it. The game is visually quite stunning, but runs fast for all that. It isn't like some games where you turn them up and say "Wow that looks cool but my system can't really handle it." It handles very well. I left it on auto on my system and it chose to do ultra textures, high for most everything else, HBAO on, and so on. Runs around 60fps pretty solid and looks extremely good. Seems to load everything like CPU, GPU, VRAM, and so on pretty heavy too.

So I would say it is pushing things close to what they can handle. You could make a better looking game, but probably only by slowing things down. It is close to the limit of what hardware today can do (unless you start talking system with multiple GPUs but single monitors).
 
FB2 is less efficient when you look at what it's doing and how much GPU throughput it needs to do it. It's a decent engine but it's not on par with metro 2033 or cryengine. Like I said before it looks decent at max settings but doesn't scale very well.

Decent?! Good god, what will it take to impress some people. :eek:
 
easily one of the best games I've seen - all settings set to ultra 1920x1080. Obviously those that say a single gtx 590 cannot run it on ultra are mistaken and don't own the card.
 
FB2 is less efficient when you look at what it's doing and how much GPU throughput it needs to do it. It's a decent engine but it's not on par with metro 2033 or cryengine. Like I said before it looks decent at max settings but doesn't scale very well.

I don't know about scaling but your Metro 2033 example makes no sense...Metro is at LEAST as demanding as BF3, probably more so actually.
 
GPU maybe...because it's really not that CPU-intensive as a lot of benchmarks and testing have shown.

On-topic, probably the best looking game out there right now considering all that it does gameplay-wise.

According to the performance graph my CPU is spiking, which means it's a bottleneck with my CPU? Seems like it's a little bit cpu intensive to me.
 
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