XFX 6600 DDR2 & MSI X1300 Pro

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 played three five-minute segments of the same 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'.

Below is a table of the best-playable settings that we found best for each video card configuration. In this title, we found that 25 frames per second minimum and a target of 55 frames per second (or higher) for the average frame rate delivered a good gaming experience on these video cards.

The MSI Radeon X1300 Pro 256MB was the slowest video card in this title, and we had to lower the details to get the game playable on this card. We found that the average frame rate was considerably lower than we were seeing on the XFX GeForce 6600 DDR2, even at playable settings. Having said that, once we had tweaked the detail settings, we were able to experience very smooth gameplay on the MSI X1300 Pro.

We found that we had to lower all of the detail settings to medium, including texture filtering, meaning that there was no anisotropic filtering enabled on the Radeon X1300 Pro. We tried to play with those settings, but we experienced some choppiness during the more intense parts of the game when the slow motion mode kicks in, as the frame rate dropped below 20 frames per second on a number of occasions. We found that lowering dynamic shadows and dynamic lights to low detail solved the choppiness problems, and we had a frame rate that was consistently above 30 frames per second.

The XFX GeForce 6600 DDR2 was playable at 1024x768 0xAA 8xAF with medium detail. We were able to set texture detail, along with texture filtering to high, meaning that we had much more detailed textures along with 8xAF from enabling high detail texture filtering. The image quality was noticeably better than what was playable on the Radeon X1300 Pro, and the average frame rate was also much higher, too.

We were able to increase both in-game details and Anti-Aliasing when we added a second GeForce 6600 DDR2 into the equation. We found that the XFX 6600 DDR2 SLI was very playable at 1024x768 2xAA 8xAF with medium high details, including high terrain, effects and texture details. The minimum frame rate did dip below 25 frames per second once during each of our three manual run throughs, but this did not affect our gameplay experience, which was very good on the whole.

The GeForce 6800 GS was much faster than XFX 6600 DDR2 SLI in this instance, in the same way that it was in Day of Defeat: Source. We found that it was playable at the exact same detail settings as the 6600 DDR2 SLI, but with a higher resolution. The increased resolution helped to make the game look much better as - even at 1024x768 with 2xAA - we were still able to see quite a lot of texture and edge aliasing. There was really no competition from the XFX GeForce 6600 DDR2 SLI in this title.