BFGTech 8800 GTX Watercooled Edition

Battlefield 2142:

Publisher: EA Games

We used the full retail version of Battlefield 2142 patched to version 1.06. It follows closely in the footsteps of Battlefield 2 and is based on the same game engine, albeit with a few modifications and improvements. The game supports normal mapping, parallax mapping, full-resolution dynamic shadowing, post processing and fog. DICE has also implemented a new enhanced lighting effect that provides a nice bloom effect.

We played three five minute run throughs of the 'Cerbere Landing' map, reporting the median average frame rate. There is 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 if enough modes were available, while we controlled anisotropic filtering from the control panel so that we could enable 16xAF.

24" widescreen gaming:

BFGTech's watercooled 8800 GTX delivered a simply phenomenal gaming experience in Battlefield 2142 at 1920x1200 - the minimum frame rate with 16xAA and transparency supersampling was actually higher than the average frame rate delivered by both the GeForce 8800 GTS and the Radeon X1950XTX at their respective highest-playable image quality settings.

We did try playing the game with 16xQ AA enabled, but the performance deficit wasn't worth the almost indistinguishable image quality benefits. For reference purposes though, BFG's watercooled 8800 GTX was capable of an average frame rate of 46 frames per second, and a minimum of 30 fps with 16xQ AA enabled. With a bit of overclocking (bear in mind that this card is capable of more than "a bit" of overclocking, as you'll see later), you'll be able to easily get that average frame rate above 50 frames per second - at that point, we'd probably enable 16xQ AA just because we can.

30" widescreen gaming:

Again, BFG's flagship card pulled out all the stops with an equally impressive showing on our 30" Dell orgasmatron™. The performance doesn't really tail off for GeForce 8800 GTX in this title - even at this somewhat insane resolution of 2560x1600.

However, it's a different story for the 8800 GTS, which does really start to tail off at the Dell's native resolution. Both effects and dynamic lighting detail had to be lowered to medium, while enhanced lighting also had to be disabled in order to maintain an acceptable gaming experience.