Similar to previous entries in the series, Battlefield 1 has a fun but brief single-player campaign that serves more as a tutorial for the game’s online multiplayer, which should be particularly polished this time around considering an multi-platform open beta was available for weeks ahead of release and drew over 13 million players. Such an active participation level so early on pointed toward an upcoming success and that indeed appears to be the case judging by reviews, with the game currently getting an aggregated rating of 86/100 according to critics from around the web.
We were among the initial testers and the BF1 beta admittedly made a strong first impression with great graphics that weren’t overly demanding. At the time it seemed like entry-level PC gaming gear could tackle this title at 1080p using reasonably high quality settings, so we’re keen to see if the full retail version is still as hardware-friendly as we remember. The game is built on the Frostbite 3.0 game engine, which will be used by 2017’s highly-anticipated Mass Effect: Andromeda and has recently been seen in games such as Need for Speed, Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, FIFA 17 and Star Wars: Battlefront, which counted itself among last year’s most attractive PC games in our opinion and might be the best indicator of what to expect out of Battlefield 1’s visuals. After testing 41 graphics cards and 20 processors in our Gears of War 4 performance review, we wanted to do the same for Battlefield 1 and for the most part we succeeded, though it hasn’t been without a few frustrations.
The biggest annoyance was by far EA’s Origin client piracy protection method which limits an account to five hardware changes per day, meaning we could only test five graphics cards per account in a 24-hour period.
Using a single account, it would have taken at least eight days to do the GPU testing that we wanted and probably another eight to complete the CPU benchmarks. In the end we purchased this game three times and it still took five days to get all the results recorded. Anyway, with that nightmare behind us we can move on to the benchmarks (or our companion gameplay review, if that’s why you’re here).
Testing Methodology
Our benchmark pass lasted 60 seconds, we started at the beginning of the “Through Mud & Blood” story where you take command of a British Mark 5 Tank. This test features plenty of AI-controlled characters and more importantly an easy to follow path that allowed us to repeatedly reproduce the test with a high degree of accuracy. Since the game appears to be well optimized, we didn’t find it necessary to test many quality presets and instead focused on including every graphics card we had on hand. We tested three standard resolutions: 1080p, 1440p and 4K.
The ‘Ultra’ preset was used though a few tweaks were made to the settings. First, the “GPU Memory Restriction” option was turned off to avoid downscaling when the graphics cards VRAM is maxed out. The FOV was also increased from the default 50 setting to 80, including inside vehicles. The latest AMD and Nvidia graphics drivers were used for testing.
Test System Specs
Intel Core i7-6700K (4.50GHz) 8GBx4 Kingston Predator DDR4-3000 Asrock Z170 Extreme7+ (Intel Z170) Silverstone Strider 700w PSU Crucial MX200 1TB Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 64-bit Nvidia GeForce 375.57 WHQL AMD Crimson Edition 16.10.2 Hotfix Radeon RX 480 (8192MB) Radeon RX 470 (4096MB) Radeon RX 460 (4096MB) Radeon R9 Fury X (4096MB) Radeon R9 Fury (4096MB) Radeon R9 Nano (4096MB) Radeon R9 390X (8192MB) Radeon R9 390 (8192MB) Radeon R9 380X (4096MB) Radeon R9 380 (2048MB) Radeon R7 360 (2048MB) Radeon R9 290X (4096MB) Radeon R9 290 (4096MB) Radeon R9 285 (2048MB) Radeon R9 280X (3072MB) Radeon R9 280 (3072MB) Radeon R9 270X (2048MB) Radeon R9 270 (2048MB) Radeon HD 7970 GHz (3072MB) Radeon HD 7970 (3072MB) Radeon HD 7950 Boost (3072MB) Radeon HD 7950 (3072MB) Radeon HD 7870 (2048MB) Nvidia Titan X (12288MB) GeForce GTX 1080 (8192MB) GeForce GTX 1070 (8192MB) GeForce GTX 1060 (6144MB) GeForce GTX 1060 (3072MB) GeForce GTX Titan (6144MB) GeForce GTX 980 Ti (6144MB) GeForce GTX 980 (4096MB) GeForce GTX 970 (4096MB) GeForce GTX 960 (2048MB) GeForce GTX 950 (2048MB) GeForce GTX 780 Ti (3072MB) GeForce GTX 780 (3072MB) GeForce GTX 770 (2048MB) GeForce GTX 760 (2048MB) GeForce GTX 750 Ti (2048MB) GeForce GTX 680 (2048MB) GeForce GTX 660 Ti (2048MB)
