Battlefield 3 Performance - Anti-Aliasing and HBAO

Having seen how most DirectX 11 GPUs handle BF3's default graphical pre-sets, we wanted to see how much impact anti-aliasing and HBAO had on overall performance. That AA drops performance is a given, but HBAO had a significant impact on performance in Battlefield: Bad Company 2; could the same be true for BF3?

As we've already established performance across a range of cards, we've only performed these tests with a GeForce GTX 560 Ti 1GB and an AMD Radeon HD 6950 2GB, running at 1,920 x 1,080 with the Ultra preset applied. All settings are adjusted in-game.

Anti-Aliasing

With the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 1GB there's a minimal performance penalty for enabling the anti-aliasing post processing option, with a 1fps hit to the average frame rate and a 2fps hit to the minimum frame rate.

Enabling 2x anti-aliasing sees a significant further drop, slashing 16 per cent from the minimum frame rate. Comparatively, the drop when switching to the maximum in-game option of 4x anti-aliasing is much smaller; just a 2fps drop in minimum frame rate, or five per cent.

What's perhaps most interesting about these results, though, is the difference between Ultra detail and High detail. With the High preset enabled, the GTX 560 Ti 1GB manages an average/minimum frame rate of 54/44fps, which is incredibly close to the performance of the same card at Ultra settings, only with AA disabled.


As we've already seen throughout our testing, AMD's cards have a much tougher time when anti-aliasing is enabled and the HD 6950 2GB is no exception. There's almost no performance penalty for enabling the game's anti-aliasing post processing, but enable 2x AA or 4x AA and performance drops sharply. With 4x AA the minimum frame rate falls 31 per cent from 45fps to 31fps, while the average frame rate drops by an amazing 35 per cent.

Again we see that, despite all other settings running at Ultra, when AA is disabled performance is very similar to using the High preset; an average of 60fps and a minimum of 45fps compared to the High preset's 60/48fps.

HBAO and SSAO

HBAO may have been a huge resource hog in Battlefield: Bad Company 2, but it's much more efficient in BF3. The difference between no ambient occlusion and HBAO for the GTX 560 Ti 1GB is 3fps from the minimum frame rate and 5fps from the average frame rate; drops of eight and 11 per cent respectively. Considering the added lighting detail brought by these settings, this seems a fair compromise; HBAO is certainly not the performance hog it's been in the past.


The HD 6950 2GB was even less troubled by the application of SSAO and HBAO. Switching from no ambient occlusion to full HBAO saw a drop of just 1fps to the minimum frame rate and 3fps to the average frame rate; decreases of just three and seven per cent respectively. It certainly seems that when it comes to HBAO in BF3, there's little harm in leaving it enabled, at least with a modern GPU.