Battlefield 4 Performance - 4K UltraHD (3,840 x 2,160)

While only a small handful of people actually use this resolution for gaming (or indeed at all), it's recently been given a big marketing push by Nvidia and especially AMD as 'the next big thing' for high end gaming, so it's worth looking at how things stack up.


As the graph's subtitle here indicates, we disabled anti-aliasing for this test. Not only would it make it too demanding for practically anything to run, but we also found it to be unnecessary - with this many pixels on a 32-inch screen the image is so crisp already that jaggies are much less of an issue.

As a result of this, the cards actually do better here than they do in the 5,760 x 1,080 test, where we left AA enabled, which should give you an indication of just how much of a performance hit it causes. Nevertheless, the pattern is the same as we see in the Eyefinity and Surround test, with the HD 7990 way out in front and the R9 290X and R9 290 outperforming the GTX 780 Ti and GTX Titan respectively on minimums but matching them on average framerates.

Sadly, the GTX 690 simply wouldn't play ball at this resolution, instead making our system lock up and crash. Multiple driver reinstalls were unable to fix the problem, so we couldn't obtain results for it.


The aforementioned pattern remains the same at the high preset too, and the HD 7990 is the only card that lets you achieve enjoyable framerates.

It's also interesting that now that we're not moving from 4x MSAA to 0x MSAA when going from ultra to high, there's much less improvement between the two (always under 10 percent). This indicates that the other ultra settings are nowhere near as demanding as MSAA is, which also explains why the visual differences between ultra and high are generally difficult to spot.


Unlike the 5,760 x 1,080 medium test, at 4K the GTX 780 Ti isn't able to surpass the R9 290X and the GTX Titan cannot usurp the R9 290 either. Both of the R9 290-series cards were designed for 4K, and this plus the general advantage AMD seems to have in BF4 helps them to maintain the better framerates. The GTX 780 is again left struggling at the bottom of the chart too.