Battlefield 4 - CPU Performance

To briefly gauge how CPU specs might affect BF4's performance, we ran our tests with our CPU at its usual overclocked setting of 4.2GHz and at stock settings (max turbo frequency of 3.8GHz). We also disabled one and then two of its four cores. There are certainly more CPU tests that could be done with BF4, but the main focus of this article is graphics performance.




Analysing these results is very easy. There's virtually zero difference between any of the settings. There's a very slight drop at medium when not using the overclocked settings, but it's almost meaningless. The game did become more unstable with just two cores enabled, however, and locked up a fair few times.

It's possible that reducing the settings further would show up framerate differences a bit more, but generally it's safe to say that you're GPU will limit you before your CPU does. That's not to say any CPU is up to the job, however. The recommended specs for the game list a quad core CPU, and we wouldn't want to use less than this, especially as the CPU would likely play a bigger role in heavily populated multiplayer maps, which is unfortunately outside the scope of this article.