Gaming Performance

Battlefield 3

Publisher: EA

From our Battlefield 3 review:

'The infantry combat is responsive and engaging, the vehicles a grin-inducing joy ride. The fact that there are so many game types and that the maps reconfigure depending on player count means there’s a huge amount of variety in BF3’s online offering, and with more unlocks than you can shake a boom-stick at, it’ll take you ages before you’ve seen and done everything. Battle Log and Origin are awkward, but Battle Log is at least functional, making it easy to find servers with free slots or running your favourite maps.

In short, Battlefield 3’s multiplayer is a triumph, and while the single player campaign isn’t the most original, or entertaining shooter, it’s the online modes that will keep us playing for months to come.'

Battlefield 3 has garnered an almost Crysis-esque reputation as a graphical benchmark for PCs. We run the game at its highest 'Ultra' settings with the Field of View set to 70. We record the average and minimum frame rates during a ninety second on rails section in the campaign mission 'Going Hunting'. The benchmark begins the moment one of the NPCs says "plans have changed".

Crysis 3

Publisher: EA

Mixing the open-world combat of Crysis with the more tightly scripted urban jungle of Crysis 2, Crysis 3 is a smorgasbord of visual effects and polygons galore. With DirectX 11 support, high resolution textures and incredibly detailed characters models, it's laid down the gauntlet for the next generation of consoles and games alike when it comes to gorgeous graphics

We test using the Very High detail preset and with Very High texture resolution. lens flare and motion blur are both enabled, although due to its heavy performance impact, anti-aliasing is disabled.

We use a custom macro-driven 60 seconds play-through from the single player mission Red Star Rising. The 60 seconds of gameplay takes place in a large open environment heavy on water and particle effects. Each test is repeated three times, with the average result taken.

We have since fixed the issue affecting our usual benchmark on Windows 8. We have therefore ran the benchmark on the first level, 'Post-Human', so as to compare the Ballista LE to the Fierce PC Prodigy GT, as well as the 'Red Star Rising' level which we use in our regular graphics benchmarks.