Galaxy GeForce 7300 GT with GDDR3

Battlefield 2

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Battlefield 2 features an all-new game engine based on the DirectX 9.0 API. There is no Shader Model 3.0 support, but the majority of hardware will use a Shader Model 2.0++ mode that includes support for Normal Maps, Parallax Mapping, Full-Resolution Dynamic Shadowing, Post Processing and Fog.

The game will look the same on both NVIDIA and ATI hardware, so there is no advantage of choosing one over the other in image quality related circumstances. The only major difference is that Ultra Shadow 2 is utilised on NVIDIA's hardware, while the shadowing on ATI hardware is done using a slightly different technique.

We patched the game to version 1.3 and then played three five-minute segments of the 'Gulf of Oman' map, reporting the median frame rate. We found that there was no ready way to duplicate testing situations manually in this game, so we felt that taking a typical slice of action from the game was the best way to report our findings. We controlled anti-aliasing from inside the game, while anisotropic filtering was set to 8xAF when the 'Texture Filtering' option was set to 'High'.

The ATI Radeon X1600XT delivered the best gaming experience out of the pair cards on test. We chose to enable higher details over anti-aliasing at the native resolution of the 19" LCD panel. We were able to enable more detail on the X1600 XT card than on the GeForce 7300 GT, but both cards provided an adequate gaming experience on our system setup.

We must also mention that we saw texture shimmering in this title on the Galaxy GeForce 7300 GT at the default driver settings. It's not as much of an issue as it is on a higher-end card, hence why we've stuck to using the default quality settings. This is because the end user is prepared to make compromises when they're not spending a lot of money on their video card.